Intel mulls cutting 16 and 32-bit support, booting straight into 64-bit mode

Re:Intel mulls cutting 16 and 32-bit support, booting straig... by citrin_ru on Thursday May 25, 2023 @06:01PM (#36076861)

It very similar to chip die space - modern technologies are so complex that to learn how 8086 works is a very small effort compare to learning how the latest intel CPUs work. And emulation of older generations is a small part of this complexity.

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Re:Intel mulls cutting 16 and 32-bit support, booting straig... by nneonneo on Thursday May 25, 2023 @07:14PM (#36077658)

I'd argue that 16-bit mode is conceptually more complicated than modern 64-bit modes, at least for userspace. 64-bit mode has a single flat address space (FS/GS are just opaque offsets into this address space), memory-mapped I/O, and a single system call trap instruction. 16-bit mode has segmentation, I/O ports, multiple trap instructions (and call gates!), address space wraparound...

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Re:Intel mulls cutting 16 and 32-bit support, booting straig... by shpx on Friday May 26, 2023 @03:01AM (#36080949)

Learning useful things is fun, learning useless things is unpleasant, so in some sense it's more effort.

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Re:Intel mulls cutting 16 and 32-bit support, booting straig... by citrin_ru on Friday May 26, 2023 @03:38AM (#36081210)

While working on not always pleasant stuff at paid job as a hobby I sometimes learn 'useless' stuff from the past. For me on average old technologies looks simpler (though not without quirks) and more interesting to learn while modern ones often look over-complicated.

Just to clarify - I don't think that Intel should retain 16bit mode, but don't think removing it would make a big difference.

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