Since I've seen that argument twice too often, I fell a need to
speak out:
The P7 will not be any reason to drop support for the 386.
Rather, since it will be essentially a RISC chip with an onboard x86
emulator (according to the hype I remember reading from Intel and HP), and
its native instruction set will be different than the x86 series, it will
need a new tree in linux/arch/. Any new features or whatever can be
implemented there; the current x86 code should continue to support the
386.
As many people have said, the 386 code isn't broken, and dropping
support for it won't really gain us anything.