The amount of accumulated cruft in the x86 architecture is astounding.

Being a geezer, I remember when there was, for a brief moment, a genuine question whether National Semiconductor, Motorola, or Intel would win the PC market. The NS processors had a nice, clean architecture. The Motorola processors, meh, ok. Intel already had cruft from earlier efforts like the 4004, and was just ugly.

Of course, Intel won, Motorola came in second, and NS became a footnote.

The x86 architecture has only gotten uglier over time.