Think of all the programmer-hours that will go into retrofiting compilers, libraries and runtime with "hardware accelerated text processing"
Don't worry, odds are almost nobody will actually use it.
They could have done the right thing and started stripping x86-32 cruft from x86-64 as it gained more traction.
There isn't really any "cruft" that matters; the old useless instructions do nothing but waste instruction code space, but that's not really a big issue; the real significant improvement would come by re-doing x86 as a three-operand architecture (and make other similar improvements that would be impossible to do "bit by bit"). Another potential improvement would be to just re-do the instruction coding to make it faster to parse; instruction decoding is becoming a significant bottleneck on x86 already. If Intel was going to do an overhaul like that, though, they'd just do it all at once.
AVX is actually beginning to go that way; we're going to have three-operand for SIMD, even though we won't have it for regular instructions.
I don't think it will happen, though; the ratio of people who care about the elegance of their processor's assembly language to people who buy computers is just too low.
Not in form of a clean cut, at least: x86-64 brought us eight additional registers and removed the silly BCD-instructions.
Don't worry, odds are almost nobody will actually use it.
They could have done the right thing and started stripping x86-32 cruft from x86-64 as it gained more traction.
There isn't really any "cruft" that matters; the old useless instructions do nothing but waste instruction code space, but that's not really a big issue; the real significant improvement would come by re-doing x86 as a three-operand architecture (and make other similar improvements that would be impossible to do "bit by bit"). Another potential improvement would be to just re-do the instruction coding to make it faster to parse; instruction decoding is becoming a significant bottleneck on x86 already. If Intel was going to do an overhaul like that, though, they'd just do it all at once.
AVX is actually beginning to go that way; we're going to have three-operand for SIMD, even though we won't have it for regular instructions.