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by rep_lodsb 56 days ago
Some other architectures like PDP-11 and 680x0 had a dedicated "clear register" instruction.

It could have been added to x86, even as a group of single-byte opcodes with the register encoded in three bits (as with PUSH, POP, and INC/DEC outside of long mode). But the XOR idiom was already established on the 8080 by that point.