[adrian_b]

Besides Windows or gaming, there is another market for x86.

If you are interested in technical and scientific computing, but you cannot afford to spend amounts of $ written with 6 digits or much more, then x86 is the only solution.

The only Arm-based CPUs with decent performance are those made by Fujitsu, which are not available at retail.

The "datacenter" GPUs from AMD and NVIDIA are much too expensive for small businesses or individuals. Even for a bigger business their price is justifiable only when they are busy close to 24/7.

So for most people only the x86 CPUs provide an acceptable performance for computations that use either FP64 numbers or large integers.

[mkesper]

Things are changing on that front, too: https://www.servethehome.com/supermicro-megadc-ars-211m-nr-r...

[adrian_b]

The Ampere CPUs may be great for something like Web servers, but they are pathetic at number crunching. The same is true for the CPU cores designed by Arm, which are used in the server CPUs of other cloud vendors.