Japanese electronics store pleads for old PCs amid ongoing hardware shortage

Re:Japanese electronics store pleads for old PCs amid ongoin... by lysace on Thursday January 08, 2026 @12:16PM (#46543585)

How much overhead (in terms of e.g. transistor count or silicon space) does this add? Surely at most it's a single digit percentage?

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Re:Japanese electronics store pleads for old PCs amid ongoin... by immibis on Thursday January 08, 2026 @02:45PM (#46545508)

There isn't a separate 8086 core in every x64 core. The whole core has "if/then" spaghetti logic scattered throughout to alter its behaviour based on being in 16-bit mode.

At best, they might have been able to confine the needed logic patches to the instruction-decoding front end.

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