This. In today's world it is easy to support multiple instruction sets in the same silicon using the same registers and ALU. So why in the name of all that is holy does the x86 not have a nice clean 64-bit instruction set that you can swap in? It's all RISC under the hood anyway, why not give us access to it? The only explanation I can think of is that Intel wants to keep things complicated as a barrier to entry for competition.

> It's all RISC under the hood anyway, why not give us access to it?

Presumably because it doesn't matter that much, so it isn't worth the investment for Intel.

It feels to me like people have trouble accepting that both of these are true: (1) RISC vs. x86 doesn't matter that much in practice; (2) technically speaking, RISC is a superior design to x86.

> Presumably because it doesn't matter that much, so it isn't worth the investment for Intel.

Intel invested in a new instruction set (IA64). AMD did not.

The market chose AMD's offering.

And the market also chose ARM's AArch64 instruction set, despite the ARM installed base being wider than x86 and a backwards incompatible break from the past. The secret? Supporting both ISAs and switching instruction sets on exceptions.

The lesson I take from history is that there is no need to maintain ISA compatibility as long as the old mode is accessible on a process level.

>The secret? Supporting both ISAs and switching instruction sets on exceptions.

The secret is that Apple controls their hardware/appstore and android apps are ISA independent.

Whot?

Didn't the AMD64 architecture spank Itanium in the marketplace long before the iPhone became a big deal?

> It's all RISC under the hood anyway, why not give us access to it? The only explanation I can think of is that Intel wants to keep things complicated as a barrier to entry for competition.

It wasn't Intel but AMD that came up with x86-64. Intel (and HP) indeed wanted to give you a clean 64-bit design - Itanium. And yes, it was meant as a barrier to entry among other things. But AMD won because Itanic didn't run existing x86 software and generally turned out to be slower than Intel hyped.

As for the internal RISC, you won't get it because it changes from generation to generation (also between vendors) and these changes are part of why x86 keeps getting faster. Furthermore, AFAIK these internal ops aren't as dense as x86 to make them simpler to decode and fetching them from memory would make bandwidth more of a bottleneck.

Related to this is the PPC615, an IBM project in the mid-90s, socket compatible with the original Pentium, and ran x86-32, PPC32, and PPC64 natively. (It got scrapped because all the signs looked like Intel was going to push IA-64 heavily, and rely on it's backwards compatibility for x86-32, hence an expectation x86-32 was soon to be legacy.)

Do you have a reference for that? I've heard various things about the 615, one of which was that it wasn't ever a real project.

AFAIK the reason for amd64 being what it is are intels lawyers.

That makes little sense, could you elaborate? AMD could have done anything they wanted with amd64 instruction encodings.

Well, not lawyers directly. More through lack of cooperation (due to competitive mentality).

http://www.agner.org/optimize/blog/read.php?i=25

I don't see how that matters in this case, AMD took the lead on AMD64 and Intel had to copy them afterward. They really could have done anything they wanted. As someone else here mentioned it was probably more to re-use the existing investment in x86 decoders.

Amd64 encoding, as is the case with most x86 encodings, is longer then it should be. Due to the two companies not communicating/cooperating.

That is the one advantage that i think ARM has over x86/amd64. That ARM encoding is much shorter.

You just repeated your point without adding anything new, that doesn't help your argument.

They couldn't use the shorter code space. So no, they could not do whatever they wanted. (note that making a completely new instruction encoding scheme would fail for obvious reasons)

I disagree, 64bit mode did not have to have any kind of instruction compatibility. It could have been a completely new instruction encoding scheme. A 64bit process must run all 64bit code, there is no invoking 32bit code from a 64bit process on any modern OS for AMD64.

And adding to that, they could've probably come up with some sort of 32bit per instruction risc structure where the the makeup overlaps with the cisc x86 encoding. For example, pack the 16 bits of a normal x86 instruction into the first bits of the risc, then add second source register and a bit or to each operand to increase the number of registers.