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A comment on X86 Register Encoding. Parent comment

Re:X86 Register Encoding by nullc on Tuesday November 01, 2016 @07:44PM (#12851159)
> 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.

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Re:X86 Register Encoding by pcwalton on Tuesday November 01, 2016 @08:54PM (#12851477)
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.

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Re:X86 Register Encoding by imtringued on Wednesday November 02, 2016 @03:34AM (#12852892)
>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.

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Re:X86 Register Encoding by adrianratnapala on Wednesday November 02, 2016 @06:16AM (#12853392)
Whot?

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

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