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It might well be fugly but it works. That's the key point.

I'm sure Intel (or anyone else), if they could develop x86 again from scratch, and with the benefit of hindsight, would create a much nicer mechanism. But that's just speculation and wishful thinking.



In the age of high level languages and compilers, that's exactly what they should have done, possible twice by now.


They did. It was called Itanium.


Itanium was a completely different type of architecture, not a rebuild that keeps the same basic form but simplifies.


Haven't they? I thought x86 was now basically just a legacy compatibility layer on top of significantly more streamlined and optimized RISC-like operations.


I think that's true, but the problem is end-users don't have access to that layer, do they?




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