Hopefully this comes to fruition (with AMD on board too). I wonder if it might spur some more hobbyist OS research.
It’s easy enough to flip an x86 into 64 bit mode at boot. Surely, slowing down emulation of 32-bit operating systems isn’t a win (and neither is forcing pointer heavy code to ~double its heap size in the rare cases where that matters).
I guess it’ll save some transistors, but those are pretty much free these days.