What features/instructions of x86 ISA are dead?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25154079

by bwooster • 6 years ago

6 6 6 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

mmastrac• 6 years ago

Two off the top of my head:

ENTER/LEAVE

BCD-style opcodes

gtirloni• 6 years ago

I wonder why Intel/AMD don't remove unused features and call it x86-64 v2. Apple seems to be doing fine with ditching things. Why can't we have a newer x86 processor that requires a recompile?

lucian19002• 6 years ago

Some of that did actually happen with AMD64, so dropping 32bit support would be a step in that direction.

Almost no one else is in Apple’s position of vertical integration though, except perhaps for the console makers.

jolmg• 6 years ago

With AMD64? I thought that was completely backwards compatible with x86. Or do you mean IA-64?

dyingkneepad• 6 years ago

Mostly because it probably doesn't hurt anything to have those instructions still there, or at least the cost of having to deal with the lone enterprise customers that still use the instruction in their legacy apps is bigger.

There are a whole lot of gates available for use: every time you shrink the processor you make space for more. I bet those old unused instructions don't really occupy a lot of them, and perhaps some of them are only implemented in microcode in terms of actually used instructions. There is no pressure to make semi-dead instructions fast.

I am not an expert here but I'm semi-confident my answer is accurate. Please correct me if I'm wrong.

What features/instructions of x86 ISA are dead?

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