this post was submitted on 18 Jan 2025
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To me x86 is currently in similar position to internal combustion engine cars. We are already almost certain some of the alternatives available right now are better.
The reason ICE/x86 seem better is that they have the benefit of being greatly optimised due to years of market dominance pulling billions if not trillions of dollars into research. Some company has to sacrifice a lot of money to get the ball rolling on new tech as it is very difficult for an emerging technology to break old tech dominance. However considering Apple seems to be pulling similar numbers on a way less developed architecture I d say we might be close.
I don't know enough about the subjects to go into details, but I know enough to say that that is reductive. ARM/alternatives are not inherently better, at least not universally. And, especially because of the inertia, I do not expect x86 to be fully replaced on the desktop any time soon. The motivations behind companies such as Apple using ARM likely have more to do with licensing than anything else
It's probably more useful to think of x86 and ARM as slightly different tools that are slightly better suited to different tasks. Desktop, server (and possibly high-performance) computing are x86's specialty, and I do not expect it to be replaced
All-in-all, from what I know, the practical differences between ARM and x86 are nowhere near large enough to be compared to something like the electric vs internal combustion engine. It's probably closer to a difference of, say, a typical train and a subway
But, please read up on this yourself. I am not an expert in hardware, this is just what i casually picked up as a layperson
x86 is dead. Has been for years. You've been using amd64. I am not referring to ARM
Differenciating amd64 as a different architecture is pedantry and in virtually all cases not useful for discussion.