This is one of the greatest criticisms I hear about x86-64, that it is too old and burdened with legacy instruction sets that nobody uses anymore. The other major criticism has to do with the variable instruction length, but that's not nearly as clear cut in my opinion. From what I have read, it seems that having a variable instruction length can be advantageous at times, and increase instruction density. Also, micro op caches and ops fusion seem to do a great job of mitigating the problem of having to add more decoders to achieve greater instruction level parallelism. So at least there are solid workarounds for that one. But the legacy stuff is another matter entirely.... How disruptive would such a move be if Intel or AMD decided to throw out most or all of the legacy x86 stuff and design a cleaner more modern architecture?
I doubt it would affect end consumers that much, more so the business and enterprise sectors. But maybe I'm wrong. There was also a rumor about this several years back from bits n' chips.it, that perhaps Willow Cove would be the last x86-64 CPU designed by Intel that had wide support for legacy instruction sets. So I guess that would be Golden Cove, assuming the rumor is true.
I doubt it would affect end consumers that much, more so the business and enterprise sectors. But maybe I'm wrong. There was also a rumor about this several years back from bits n' chips.it, that perhaps Willow Cove would be the last x86-64 CPU designed by Intel that had wide support for legacy instruction sets. So I guess that would be Golden Cove, assuming the rumor is true.