Most old computer architectures had a much more complete set of hardware exceptions, including cases like integer overflow or out-of-bounds access.

In modern superscalar pipelined CPUs, implementing all the desirable hardware exceptions without reducing the performance remains possible (through speculative execution), but it is more expensive than in simple CPUs.

Because of that, the hardware designers have taken advantage of the popularity gained by languages like C and C++ and almost all modern programming languages, which no longer specify the behavior for various errors, and they omit the required hardware means, to reduce the CPU cost, justifying their decision by the existing programming language standards.

The correct way to solve this would have been to include in all programming language standards well-defined and uniform behaviors for all erroneous conditions, which would have forced the CPU designers to provide efficient means to detect such conditions, like they are forced to implement the IEEE standard for floating-point arithmetic, despite their desire to provide unreliable arithmetic, which is cheaper and which could win benchmarks by cheating.