i don't know if this has been touched upon before, but i was just thinking about the abysmal performance of the itanium running x86 instructions. could intel have just tacked on a pentium core onto the itanium somewhere? couldn't that have solved the x86 issue for itanium instead of having to run hardware translation using the itanium processor? since the pentium only had 3 million transistor, that's not a lot of die real-estate.
along the same lines, current 32-bit and 64-bit x86 cpus, for the most part, don't run 8-bit or 16-bit code anymore (except during startup, but that's usually about it). why not just tack on a 286 core? that thing only had 134k transistors versus the tens of millions that current processors have. could that not free up more die space for other things?
along the same lines, current 32-bit and 64-bit x86 cpus, for the most part, don't run 8-bit or 16-bit code anymore (except during startup, but that's usually about it). why not just tack on a 286 core? that thing only had 134k transistors versus the tens of millions that current processors have. could that not free up more die space for other things?