Intel chips even support 16-bit processing. How is that not baggage? | Hacker News

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		higherpurpose on Aug 3, 2014 \| parent \| context \| favorite \| on: Macintel: The End Is Nigh Intel chips even support 16-bit processing. How is that not baggage?

nknighthb on Aug 3, 2014 | [–]

An 8086 had <30k transistors. Haswell is well over a billion. They could add a hundred dedicated 8086 cores to Haswell and you wouldn't notice the difference.

wmf on Aug 3, 2014 | [–]

It is baggage, but it costs very little.

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