The ability to fundamentally alter instruction decoding and execution on AMD K8 processors is sure to interest AMD K8 hackers everywhere. Unfortunately, it is not clear if this has much practical use. The updates are structured to patch specific AMD K8 lines, and there are a very limited number of patch slots available around 64 if the patented technique was actually implemented as described. Adding useful new instructions to the ISA is therefore unlikely; at best we could enable a[…]
