I know some people who understand x86 [0] very well. Most of them do not work at Intel. Those that do tend to be on the OSS side and don’t really have any sway

I know some people who understand x86 [0] very well. Most of them do not work at Intel. Those that do tend to be on the OSS side and don’t really have any sway in the parts of Intel that design new hardware. And this is a problem! Most of Intel’s recent major architectural changes over the last decade or so have been flops. [1] Quite a few have been reverted, often even after they ship. I presume that Intel does not actually have many people who are really qualified to work on the architecture. [0] I’m talking about how it interacts with an OS and how you put it together into a working system. Understand stuff like SIMD is a different thing. [1] AVX and its successors are notable exceptions, but they still have issues, and Intel did not really rock the early implementations.