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Considering Intel is merely considering it at this stage means they're probably still several years away from actually releasing chips without 16/32-bit support.

By that time, CPUs will be faster, and Intel will have had plenty of time to figure out the emulation layer.

These days, how much performance-critical software is even being built in 32-bit?

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> These days, how much performance-critical software is even being built in 32-bit?

I think the better question is how much performance critical software built in 32 bit is still relied on, and may potentially outlive hardware with 32 bit support

If it's old, even with emulation it'd have a good chance to be as fast or faster than on its original target chips. So you'd need to not only rely on it, but also be demanding more from it over time. And given that you're running 32-bit software in a 32-bit vm on a 64-bit cpu in the first place (in a scenario where you're spending significant amounts of time in ring 0!), you clearly do not really care about performance anyway.

Everything is performance-critical. I buy new hardware so it runs my software as fast as it can. Why would I upgrade my CPU if I knew my programs would start running slower?

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