Comment by holowoodman 7 hours ago
A subset of an ISA will be incompatible with the full ISA and therefore be a new ISA. No existing software will run on it. So this won't really help anyone.
And x86 isn't that nice to begin with, if you do something incompatible, you might as well start from scratch and create a new, homogenous, well-designed and modern ISA.
Sadly over the past year, Spotify builds require AVX extensions. Had an issue updating my 2008 Dell semi-upgraded bench PC that has a Q9300 in it (no AVX on it)
But thankfully I could install an old bin and lock it out from updating.
Intel’s software development emulator might run the newest bin but variable how slow it might be.
In other circumstances, the AVX extensions aren’t required but the app is compiled to fail if they’re not required: https://www.reddit.com/r/pcgaming/comments/pix02j/hotfix_for...
There are software compiled today without using MMX support. I was thinking the idea of something that is open or for licensing is an 86 ISA that is forward compatible. And for customers that requires strict backward compatibility they could still source it from AMD and Intel.
i.e Software compiled for 86 should work on x86. The value for backward compatibility is kept with both Intel and AMD. If the market wants something in between they now have an option.
I know this isn't a sexy idea because HN or most tech people like something shiny and new. But I have always like the idea of extracting value from the "old and tried" solutions.