Yep. couple of beers here so rant time.
Intel's architecture at this point is a joke and a liability and needs to go away. x86-64 needs to go away really as well, including AMD's implementation. You take a pile of shit (segmented memory [remember near and far pointers], hackity hack, horrid non-orthogonal instruction set) then keep shoveling shit on top of it because your entire ecosystem is glued to the hardware so intimately that you're stuck. On goes floating point (which didn't work very well at least twice), memory protection, badly and rudimentary paging. On goes several bitness and operational modes trying to pretend it's not a 1970s relic. Then your ecosystem demands more juice so on goes shared caches, SMP, bus arbitration. Then a cheap ass vendor comes along and provides 64-bit extensions when you're digging in the pile of shit one day. You're then forced to implement this to be competitive, chuck on the fire a whole new memory model. At the same time this entire clump of turds is actually turning into a virtual machine sitting on top of a weird ass pipelined RISC core full of bugs from hell with several other CPUs that do god knows what the hell glued on the side. Eventually the cracks show (meltdown etc) and the whole house of cards collapses (happening in next two years).
And there you have a modern PC, server and every damn cloud computing provider on the planet: 1970s tech with a pile of turds on top of it floating on a sewage farm of an architecture. A rube goldberg machine from the depths of hell.