Although time consuming, it would be very necessary and very rewarding to have most of the ASM code re-worked for newer processors so that it will hopefully execute more efficiently and more stably, and probably reduce CPU usage down a bit lower than it can even get too as of now.
And the FireEngine procedural textures would benefit more using hardware based shader language, so that they are generated on the 3-D card, and away from the main CPU calculations, same with the Transform & Lighting.
Feel free to yell at me, because this is just my opinion and I'm very depressed and tired as of typing this.....
Why yelling at you? The idea and the suggestion are alright and I'd love to realize such things. But realizing it costs a lot of time and needs even more bugtesting.
Also many more things related to it would require some rework. At the moment it just can't be realized, not with the time I have, not with the people who work really hard with me, since I'm just not allowed to share parts out of the engine.
And don't forget the testers and the new releases needed to test this all out to find and fix new bugs.
Sometimes you have to lose a fight to win the war.