4 ms·
The few truly new features that have come along are not really emulate-able. Things like 64 bit, or new secure modes. Most everything else has been bundles of
by sliverstorm 12y ago
The few truly new features that have come along are not really emulate-able. Things like 64 bit, or new secure modes.
Most everything else has been bundles of hardware accelerated instructions for performance gains on popular data classes (see: MMX, AVX256, etc).
It's rare you run into software that doesn't have multiple codepaths, leveraging an extension if you have it and bypassing it if you don't.
Extensions that you are defacto required to have are so old, you almost certainly have them anyway. MMX was introduced in 1997 in the P5. MMX support will not be the first problem on your list if you're trying to run modern software on a P4.