A significant part of the Internet goes back to the innocent days of 2001, when Intel launched the Itanium architecture to replace the then 32-bit-only x86 architecture – before AMD’s competing x86_64 architecture – Intel Now released a white paper With the related X86-S specification, which tries to get the community’s opinion on it by essentially removing all features from x86 processors up to x86_64.
Today you can install a copy of MSDOS 6.11 on a brand new Intel Core i7 system. some caveats, it’s undeniable that for most PC users, the removal of 16 and 32-bit mode, as well as the proposed removal of rings 1 and 2, as well as other low-level (I/O) bandwidth, will go unnoticed. features. Instead of a boot process going from 16-bit real mode to protected mode and from 32-bit mode to 64-bit mode, the system will boot directly into 64-bit mode, and that’s the mode Intel uses anyway.
Where things get a little hazy is that on this theoretical X86-S, you simply cannot install and boot your current 64-bit operating systems because they have no understanding of this new boot procedure or other low-level features. This is the place Itanium The comparison seems most apt because it was Intel’s attempt at a clean cut with the x86 legacy, only for everything to go horribly wrong with the concept (VLIW) and ‘legacy firmware’ support.
Although X86-S seems less ambitious than Itanium, it would be interesting to hear AMD’s thoughts on this.