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I wonder why Intel and AMD still keep the 32 bit and even 16 bit parts. Are there people still running many legacy apps?
by DeathArrow 2y ago
I wonder why Intel and AMD still keep the 32 bit and even 16 bit parts. Are there people still running many legacy apps?
- deafpolygon 2y agoYes
- jerdfelt 2y agoIntel has proposed dropping 32-bit and 16-bit support in the future. https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/developer/articles/technical/envisioning-future-simplified-architecture.html https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/developer/articles/t...
- layer8 2y agoThe proposal doesn’t remove 32-bit user land or (I think) virtualization.
- wtallis 2y agoX86S allows 32-bit ring3 (userland) but even VMs are stuck in long mode and only support 32-bit code for userland. Booting a VM for a 64-bit OS that has a legacy bootloader with 16-bit or 32-bit code would require software emulation of that code.
- adamc 2y agoAs a consumer, yes. Old steam games are a big deal. In business... not where I work, but I hear stories of shops that still have lots of old 32-bit COM stuff, etc.
- layer8 2y ago32-bit applications are still pretty ubiquitous, including Office add-ins, and there is no particular benefit on x86 in removing support for 32-bit on the application side.
- monocasa 2y agoOn windows, a lot of installers are 32-bit even if the application they're installing is 64-bit so that they can fail gracefully on 32-bit OSes.