Is it possible to (theoretically) develop a CPU having a hybrid ISA such that half of the cores in it use the x86 architecture and the other half uses the ARM architecture? The x86 cores would run the x86 instructions that the CPU receives, while the ARM cores would run the ARM instructions. This would allow the CPU to be natively compatible with softwares for both the ISA's without the need of any emulation, which would eradicate any performance penalty that might arise due to emulation.
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What you're talking about is known as asymmetric multiprocessing, where you have multiple logical cores with different ISAs.
Not only is it possible, you might have one. Many consumer-grade CPUs have GPUs on the same die.
There is one other famous example. The IBM Cell had a main PowerPC core (with two-way simultaneous multithreading, so 2 logical cores) called the PPE, each of these had 8 additional cores with a different ISA attached to them, called "synergistic processing elements", or SPEs for short. The SPEs were designed for extremely high throughput SIMD operations, at the cost of having no branch prediction.
This CPU shipped over 87 million units, and you probably know someone who had one, or may have had one yourself, since it was used in Sony's PlayStation 3 games console.
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