> Note that this is not designed for fine-grained feature selection, like
> the alpha amask or x86 CPUID.  

This is not architecturally correct for x86.

intel's processor documentation is *very* explicit that, in
architectures which support the CPUID feature mask, it is never
correct to assume that a feature is present because the processor type
is greater than some threshhold.

 - Certain features have been removed from the architecture entirely
(e.g., processor serial number)

 - certain features can be disabled by the BIOS before boot.

 - given the multiple parallel tracks of development even within
Intel, features don't appear in a linear order.  If you add in AMD and
Cyrix and the like, life gets even more nonlinear..

					- Bill