>The question is, did CPU evolve so much it became impossible to translate from one arch to another ?
I'd say software got a bit more complex compared to then.
Furthermore, that works if you have controlled hardware (which means easier testing and less edge cases to worry about) and a single transition to worry about (from A to B, not {A,B,C,D,E} -> {A,B,C,D,E}).
Can you imagine how insane it will be if Windows shipped a compatibility layer that translates x86 software to ARM, to RISC-V, to MIPS, to whatever? You need to test compatibility for not one but 3 architectures. No way people are gonna do that; the RoI is almost nonexistent.
So the only solution is to recompile, which is annoying if you don't have the great software infrastructure to do so.
Its not nearly as hard as you think to translate between isas. Some things won't directly translate, like say the matrix multiply resister in some mips super computers, but you can easily just swap that out for a more mundane approach.
I'd say software got a bit more complex compared to then.
Furthermore, that works if you have controlled hardware (which means easier testing and less edge cases to worry about) and a single transition to worry about (from A to B, not {A,B,C,D,E} -> {A,B,C,D,E}).
Can you imagine how insane it will be if Windows shipped a compatibility layer that translates x86 software to ARM, to RISC-V, to MIPS, to whatever? You need to test compatibility for not one but 3 architectures. No way people are gonna do that; the RoI is almost nonexistent.
So the only solution is to recompile, which is annoying if you don't have the great software infrastructure to do so.