[pabloski]

Yes it is important for competition. But this gives x86 another century of survival. Seriously, someone kill x86 please!

[TheSpiceIsLife]

If you use any complex tool enough you will rapidly come up against its limitations and bizarre design implementations.

Is there any reason to believe any other architure that tries to be, approximately, everything for everyone would fair any better?

[krylon]

Never underestimate the value of backward compatibility.

Any architecture that wants to take a decent swing at replacing x86 will either have to be x86-compatible or do a good job at emulating it accurately and efficiently.

[lawnchair_larry]

No it won’t. ARM has already displaced it pretty heavily and will continue to do so.

[krylon]

Is "displaced" the correct term, though?

In mobile devices, ARM has an almost(?)-monopoly indeed, but x86 never was a serious contender in that space to begin with. The same goes for "IoT" devices. In new areas of computing, Intel is just one vendor among many (well, several), and the more the market tends to demand low-power chips, Intel's advantage melts away. In that sense, I agree with you. In HPC, I could see ARM become a serious alternative, because the trend seems to be to delegate the heavy lifting to GPUs, anyway, and the GPU does not care what kind of CPU feeds it, so to speak.

But in the traditional desktop area, if you cannot run Windows and the huge number of third-party applications available there, you might as well give up. And to completely "replace" x86/x64, you have to compete in the desktop market as well.