this post was submitted on 28 Oct 2023
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Will Intel exist in 2026? NVIDIA and AMD are making ARM chips for 2025, China is investing heavily in RISC-V, and AMD already released a CPU that rivals Apple's M2 which is x86. Who knows how things will turn out once they release an ARM chip.
Things are shaping up to become an NVIDIA vs AMD arms race with some Chinese company becoming a dark horse and announcing a RISC-V chip in 2-3 years.
There was a company that announced a major technological advancement in chip fabrication in the US, but I can't remember who or what it was. My maggot brain thinks something with light-based chips or something? I dunno... that might also be something to look out for
Edit: it was intel: Intel Demos 8-Core, 528-Thread PIUMA Chip with 1 TB/s Silicon Photonics
It will take at least another 10 years to get a majority of the market off of x86 with the 20+ years of legacy software bound to it. Not to mention all of the current gen x86 CPUs that will still be usable 10 years from now.
I'm not sure about that. If for example the EU says "for the environment, you may not use chips that use X watts/Ghz" or something, x86 might be out of the game pretty quickly. Also, becoming market leader doesn't mean old hardware, it's the new hardware. I bet by 2030, the majority of chipsets sold will be either ARM or RISC-V. AMD did make an ARM rival with the 7840U, but with their entry in to ARM in 2025, it's not preposterous to believe the ARM ecosystem will pick up steam.
Also, recompiling opensource stuff for ARM is probably not going to be a huge issue. clang and gcc already support ARM as a compilation target, and unless there's x86 specific code in python or ruby interpreters, UI frameworks like Qt and GTK, they should be able to be compiled without much issue. If proprietary code can't keep up or won't keep up, the most likely outcome will be x86 emulators or the dumping of money into QEMU or stuff like Rosetta for windows.
Anyway, I'm talking out of my ass here as I don't write C/C++ and don't have to deal with cross-compilation, nor do I have any experience in hardware. It's all just a feeling.
FYI, arm can already handle most Open Source Software with no problem as far compiling them is concerned. In particular, Qt and GTK does work, and cross compiling too is very easy. Not that it's necessary anyway (aside of probably faster compilation unless you have really good ARM CPU). In particular, QEMU have qemu-user (if you didn't know), which basically Rosetta for Linux, but with a good performance hit when testing cross-compiled code.
Edit: In my opinion, what will switch the faster to a non-x86 on a large scale (for computers, not counting phones, tablet and microcontroller, not using them anyway) are servers. A lot of them use standard open source software, so switching might be pretty easy if the package manager abstract it (like... All of those I know).
I mean, certain cloud provider are starting to offer renting such servers (and not speaking of all those hacker who host server on raspi (and then those who use standard linux on mobile phone too))
Aren't Box64 and FEX faster though?
Thank you, that was informative. Also, didn't know about qemu-user!