Advanced Micro Devices Inc (AMD)

[chipguy]

The Alpha guys had the right technical approach to x86 compatibility all along

Can you refresh my memory about this?

They kept their modern 64 bit hardware entirely free
of x86 encumbrances. They had a emulator/translator
system called FX!32 that was entirely software based.
For a while in the late 1990s running x86 software on
Alpha under FX!32 was by far the fastest way to run
most x86 Win NT apps, an amazing achievement IMO.

Intel has taken the FX!32 concept, modernized it in
several major ways and released it as IA-32 EL. With
this software x86 apps can run on IA-64 hardware at
about three times higher performance than the native
hardware based x86 compatibility mode. Most importantly
IMO is the fact that IA-32 EL relies entirely on the IA-64
functionality of the processor. Future IA-64 processors
can be as x86-free as Alpha was and still run x86 apps
under IA-32 EL.