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https://www.righto.com/2022/11/a-bug-fix-in-8086-microprocessor.html
While reverse-engineering the 8086 from die photos, a particular circuit caught my eye because its physical layout on the die didn't match the surrounding circuitry. This circuit turns out to implement special functionality for a couple of instructions, subtlely changing the way they interacted with interrupts. Some web searching revealed that this behavior was changed by Intel in 1978 to fix a problem with early versions of the 8086 chip. By studying the die, we can get an idea of how Intel dealt with bugs in the 8086 microprocessor.
In modern CPUs, bugs can often be fixed through a microcode patch that updates the CPU during boot.1 However, prior to the Pentium Pro (1995), microprocessors could only be fixed through a change to the design that fixed the silicon.
(Score: 3, Informative) by owl on Friday May 05, @03:26PM
The Opterons and their outrunning the P4's were what led to Intel back licensing the 64 bit extensions from AMD. During this time frame Intel's "64bit" path was the Itanium chip, so they ignored extending x86 to 64bits. AMD grabbed that opportunity for themselves, and the performance of their chips (and the growing realization that Itanium was headed for a similar shipwreck as the iAPX432 chip set) pretty much forced Intel to license the 64-bit extensions from AMD.