[thedeadfish]

Not at all, the original 16bit x86 was well designed. The 32bit extensions were pretty decent too. Its not until much later that it really started to turn to shit. The real disaster started when Intel started haphazardly adding terribly thought out SIMD instructions. AMD64 truly sucks though, this is where the original encoding should have been replaced.

[tabtab]

The 16bit chip had to be backward compatible with the 8bit, no?

[thedeadfish]

Kind of but not really, whilst it shares some design choices, the 8086 is neither source or binary compatible with the 8080.