[Brian_K_White]

That all sounds like effects caused by various companies policies, not things caused by the ISA. IE it's Intel and AMD selling well documented general purpose parts to anyone vs Arm and Qualcomm selling licences and undocumented highly integrated parts to Samsung & Apple, not x86 vs risc.

Probably also IBM for kicking off the pc platform in the first place where anyone could produce compatible parts. If IBM had done that with a 68k instead, it would be 68k instead of x86.

[yjftsjthsd-h]

I strongly agree that in theory these things are unrelated, and there's no hard reason someone couldn't make, say, a bunch of PC models and socketed ARM processors that all used nice standardized interfaces and had the same flexibility as x86... but in practice if you want an open platform today you almost certainly want x86. When some alternative gets its act together I'll be thrilled to use it, but we aren't there today.