Gregory's Server@pervognsen That's great. I didn't know about that! Vaguely reminds me of Lexra's attempt to work around the SGI / MIPS patent on unaligned loads and stores (come on!).
Unclear how that one would've been resolved in court since Lexra settled to avoid the risk of the lawsuit being resolved in court.
@danluu Like with most such things I learned about both parts (the macro-op fusion and the patent infringement reason for splitting up the instructions) from @rygorous but I can't find any blog write-ups of the full story. The macro-op fusion part of the story is here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19329873