Actually, the blame should fall on IBM, not on Intel. IBM chose Intel 8086 for its PC _precisely because_ the 8086 was a bad architecture -- in particular, an architecture that would have trouble growing beyond 16 bits. IBM did this to avoid any competition with its 32-bit & beyond mainframes. Later on, IBM dabbled a bit with so-called "RISC" architectures, but never really had their hearts in it, so they never amounted to very much. IBM also developed "micro mainframes" that were inexpensive ways to run standard mainframe software, but these were never marketed aggressively, and may have been built simply as "spec-ware" or RFP-ware, and not really available for an ordinary customer to purchase. Intel experimented with a wide variety of weird architectures (thank you, Justin Rattner) that wasted huge amounts of research dollars (a lot of which came from Uncle Sam) but never amounted to anything. It wasn't until AMD became a real threat with its 64-bit ideas that Intel was finally forced to start getting its act together. Many govt labs bought AMD machines with great abandon, and given the small size of AMD relative to Intel, I'd look very carefully at the AMD architecture & its masks for "hidden" instructions and instruction modes that AMD might have developed for its best customers. AMD's integrated GPU's were a good idea for the ordinary consumer computer games, but even a better idea for one-way function hacking like bitcoin mining and password cracking. Re backwards compatibility: that may be true for the Microsoft kingdom, but the success of the ARM architectures in phones & Linux shows that assembly-level compatibility no longer has the importance that it once had. At 03:55 PM 4/19/2014, Warren D Smith wrote:
Thing is, I think Intel actually KNOWS they've painted themselves into a corner with a fundamentally bad architecture, but they did an experiment where they tried to make+sell a better one and nobody bought it since their old x86 software would not work on it. The lesson they learned was: to hell with good architecture, the only thing that matters is backwards compatibility back to the stone age.