Hacker News Reader

Comment by DeathArrow | Hacker News Reader

I wonder why Intel and AMD still keep the 32 bit and even 16 bit parts. Are there people still running many legacy apps?

View on HN

As a consumer, yes. Old steam games are a big deal.

In business... not where I work, but I hear stories of shops that still have lots of old 32-bit COM stuff, etc.

Intel has proposed dropping 32-bit and 16-bit support in the future.

https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/developer/articles/t...

The proposal doesn’t remove 32-bit user land or (I think) virtualization.

X86S allows 32-bit ring3 (userland) but even VMs are stuck in long mode and only support 32-bit code for userland. Booting a VM for a 64-bit OS that has a legacy bootloader with 16-bit or 32-bit code would require software emulation of that code.

On windows, a lot of installers are 32-bit even if the application they're installing is 64-bit so that they can fail gracefully on 32-bit OSes.

Why would you care that the installer fails gracefully?

It's helpful for the users

The OS already throws a specific error message, and it is the OS that should be responsible for this.

This gives you no opportunity for a customized product-specific upgrade UI!

Choosing to install the 32-bit version could also be an option I suppose.

32-bit applications are still pretty ubiquitous, including Office add-ins, and there is no particular benefit on x86 in removing support for 32-bit on the application side.

Yes

Reply on news.ycombinator.com