3 ms·

> that's going to put the industry through the pain of a new ISA, X86s is supposed to radically simplify the pain, get rid of a very arcane ratcheting up of an

> that's going to put the industry through the pain of a new ISA, X86s is supposed to radically simplify the pain, get rid of a very arcane ratcheting up of antiquated unused modes. It's supposed to decrease pain. And simplify implementation too. We don't dare to reimagine because it's not clear what ISA would be better or what the wins would really be. Folks like Apple turn to existing ancient instruction sets like ARM rather than reinvent because it works and the ISA doesn't really seem to have that much influence on the core design & performance.

hakfoo 2y ago
The risk with X86S was that people didn't really know what the corner cases were. I'd assume if you start with a fairly vanilla system, all modern x86-64 code, then yeah it's going to work fine. But I could imagine some of the modes and instructions that might get yeeted could cause unforeseen consequences on more "delicate" software. Obviously this means stuff like "386-only binary applications from 1991" but I'd wonder if some of the weird modes are intentionally triggered by things like copy-protection software to make them less easily reverse-engineered.