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.