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[Bofferbrauer2]

Pemalite said:

Bofferbrauer2 said:

To be fair, those questions have been arising since at least the mid-90's.

But the advantage of an architecture like x86 is that you can add instructions of variable length later down the line, and this has kept the architecture ahead so far, and I expect this to stay the same more or less for the next decades to come.

Older instructions have also slowly been removed over time.

Case in point... 3D Now! is no longer in modern CPU's, so the only way those programs/games can run, is that they must emulate that extension... And some CPU's MMX is translated into SSE instructions and so on.

x86 is great for high performance, high frequency computing, which is why it has remained a step ahead of PowerPC, ARM, MIPS in the performance stakes.

Yeah I know, just didn't want to go too much into details. Much of the original x86 instructions and many pre-MMX extensions (386, 486 and the original pentium got some small additions) are gone, too.

Makes you wonder if the old adage that you could in theory downgrade any x86 processor all the way down to an 8086 if most of it's original instructions et is missing...