The 80286 and 80386 never had special support for the "A20 gate". That was provided by (often slow) external circuitry.
Some CPUs (I cannot remember which) built in an A20 gate to their CPUs to improve performance.
The P6 was a complete implementation of the 80286 and 80386, Virtual 8086 mode, TSS, and all - you could boot DOS or an 80286 operating system on a P6 without any problems, although the design was not optimised to improve performance of 16-bit software. This was enough of a problem that they rolled back that design by the Celeron era because there were still a lot of people using 16-bit apps.
Comments
The 80286 and 80386 never had special support for the "A20 gate". That was provided by (often slow) external circuitry.
Some CPUs (I cannot remember which) built in an A20 gate to their CPUs to improve performance.
The P6 was a complete implementation of the 80286 and 80386, Virtual 8086 mode, TSS, and all - you could boot DOS or an 80286 operating system on a P6 without any problems, although the design was not optimised to improve performance of 16-bit software. This was enough of a problem that they rolled back that design by the Celeron era because there were still a lot of people using 16-bit apps.