[wmf]

Intel needs to sacrifice Microsoft and make x86 a legacy architecture.

The last time Intel did this it was called Itanium and it was horrible. Historically, almost all attempts to replace an enormously successful product line with something incompatible have failed.

[pcwalton]

> Historically, almost all attempts to replace an enormously successful product line with something incompatible have failed.

Except AArch64, which has a legacy 32 bit mode for compatibility but is otherwise a totally separate ISA, unlike x86-64 and i386.

[StillBored]

Aarch64 looks at first glance to be pretty dissimilar, but if you consider that its really a follow-on to THUMB2 it doesn't look as foreign. Also a lot of things appear different at first glance but aren't because they have basically been renamed.

one example CPUID->MIDR

http://infocenter.arm.com/help/topic/com.arm.doc.ddi0432c/Bh...

https://developer.arm.com/docs/ddi0500/f/4-system-control/45...

The memory model is the same.. etc, etc, etc.

[pjmlp]

If AMD hadn't come up with x64, they would have succeeded it.

[Tanegashima]

6502 - 68000