Perhaps a change in the CEO role has pushed Intel towards the right direction in terms of cleaning up unnecessary side projects that could drain resources over time without noticing as Team Blue announces the abandoning of the x86S specification.
Originally an initiative to debloat the age-old x86 instruction set to make it an exclusively 64-bit set, the draft was published by them sometime during May 2023 with a small revision delivered in June. However, it is now dead, presumably due to the establishment of the x86 Ecosystem Advisory Group which may have “advised” them to give up to not cause any chaos within the industry, just maybe.
The main input might not only come from AMD alone since the entire group also includes other parties like Google, HP, Oracle, Broadcom, etc, and I do think from their perspective, Intel is in no position to pull off such a stunt since they have more important stuff to deal with, such as their back-against-the-wall bet on its 18A process node rumored to achieve only around 10% yield rate at the current iteration.
With over 46 years of dominance shrouded by the red and blue giant, there is way too much hardware relying on the basis of the x86 instruction set including critical infrastructure powered by selected legacy hardware. Therefore, if x86S were to go mainstream which results in 32-bit instructions getting ditched, one could imagine the amount of trouble nations have to go through to replace all those “abandonware”.
But welp, seems like the real “abandonware” was the other way around.
Source: Tom’s Hardware
