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The proposal trims a lot of historical baggage All of that is a tiny amount of die area relative to the whole CPU. After all, a 386 has only 275k transistors.
by userbinator 2y ago
The proposal trims a lot of historical baggage
All of that is a tiny amount of die area relative to the whole CPU. After all, a 386 has only 275k transistors.
X86S is Stupid. Intel apparently forgot what made them worth choosing over competitors like ARM and now RISC-V. Non-compatible x86 makes little sense.
...and if they want to include the virtualisation extension, they still need to include that backwards-compatible functionality.
- Symmetry 2y agoA tiny amount of die area, a huge amount of engineering and validation effort. If segmentation issues can cause the register renamer to lose track of who owns a physical register that's the sort of issue that's terrible to find and debug but which also can't be allowed in a real device. Intel has traditionally been able to just throw more engineers at the problem than their competitors, but I"m not sure that'll be the case going forwards.
- whizzter 2y agoMainline OS's have been 64bit for about 15-20 years by this point, the point is to trim parts of X86 that isn't used when running a 64bit OS. Notice that only 32bit kernel/R-0 is removed, but not usermode/R-3 so even when reducing this your 64bit Windows will still run clean 32bit software built for Win95 from the 90s. Even today you need to run a virtualized 32bit OS to run old 16bit software (the negative part is if you still run a virtualized 32bit OS then it'll need to be emulated instead of HW virtualized if the virtualization solutions allowed that).
- 15155 2y ago> Intel apparently forgot what made them worth choosing over competitors like ARM People (myself and others I know) choose ARM chips because they don't absolutely mandate the purchase of sanctioned chipsets/other supporting components you don't have access to, impossible-to-obtain specs, etc.