>>14
Never knew about the 80376 - it's interesting that that was tried so early. When that chip was released, DOS still ruled the PC. I'm not so sure that's true anymore. A legacy free system running coreboot stays in real mode for maybe the first 10 instructions.
The compatibility bits may be cheap in terms of transistors, but you pay for them in other places. All the added complexity is very expensive to maintain and test. Ever wonder why the PC has a while cottage industry of software vendors writing chipset initialization code that all the other platforms seem to do without? Real mode code is
expensive.
>>15
jewops basically are the core instruction set now.