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by userbinator 705 days ago
Intel tried that with the 80376 and it did not go well: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_80376

Neither did the Itanium (Itanic).

Backwards compatibility is the whole reason for choosing x86 over ARM, MIPS, RISC-V, etc. Sadly it seems some people at Intel and AMD don't realise this.

1 comments

Backwards compatibility is good and necessary. But I don't think backwards compatibility going all the way back to the 8086 is. If someone has software written for the 8086 at this point, they would be far better served by running it in dosbox or something than on bare metal.