Would you imagine you could take a relatively-modern Intel or AMD pc and set up common outdated MS-DOS on it? Well, you possibly can (relying considerably on the machine). Doing so will totally waste the potential of such a system, however the entire legacy assist constructions are nonetheless in place to make such a factor possible. Those legacy options are arguably the qualities that separate a “PC” from some other sort of pc.
Intel, truly, is the among the many teams making that case, or no less than presenting the concept. In a weblog put up titled “Envisioning a Simplified Intel Architecture,” Intel presents up “x86-S,” the place the “S” presumably stands for “simplified.” It’s a revision of the present x86-64 ISA that trims off the entire legacy cruft to face by itself as a 64-bit-only instruction set structure.
What legacy cruft, you might ask? There’s quite a bit. The origins of the trendy x86-64 ISA lie within the Intel 8086 processor that was launched all the way in which again in 1978, and an unimaginable quantity of that authentic instruction set stays in trendy processors, to say nothing of the extensions added with every successive processor: the 286, 386, and 486, the Pentium and its later MMX derivatives, and so forth.
The issues Intel is contemplating slicing comprise stuff like 16-bit addressing assist, ring 3 I/O port accesses, rings 1 and a couple of of their entirety, string port I/O, legacy APIC assist together with the 8259, and naturally, all of the processor mode bits related to all this legacy stuff.
Don’t fuss an excessive amount of in regards to the phrase “64-bit solely.” What Intel is referring to is the “lengthy mode” of x86-64 CPUs. In different phrases, these could be chips that may solely function in 64-bit mode, simply as your present processor nearly definitely already does. None of your 32-bit purposes needs to be affected; Intel notes that this modification would permit CPUs to make use of the “simplified segmentation mannequin of 64-bit mode for 32-bit purposes.”
Intel’s proposal comes within the type of a whitepaper that is 46 pages lengthy and intensely technical in nature. If you are not a seasoned x86 meeting programmer or processor architect your self, you are pretty unlikely to make heads or tails of it. As an end-user, for those who’re not utilizing 16-bit purposes, the change you would be almost definitely to note could be accelerated boot speeds even over what we have already got.
Interestingly, the way in which Intel describes these “legacy lowered” processors seems like they’d exist alongside normal Intel64 (or x86-64) processors. In truth, Intel describes a state of affairs the place an ordinary Intel64 processor implements the brand new options from x86S, together with 64-bit native boot. The firm is inviting suggestions on the proposal from, apparently, anybody. If you’d wish to remark, head to this web page and click on the hyperlink on the backside.
