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by hypothesis 460 days ago
> I can't imagine a world where we only have one x86 manufacturer.

Does it even matter? Some people won’t notice even if there are zero x86 manufacturers.

In fact I would say lots of people have not bought x86 CPU in while, between Mac, RPi and risc-v boards…

1 comments

X86 is still needed for a lot of software. The emulation just isn't there yet.
That would be news to people on mac with Rosetta Stone / Crossover.
A lot of server code and specialized software won’t work.

Competition is always good

Server code tends to be extremely portable. Just recompile for the new architecture and you are done. The porting work for servers has already been done by the community. The main exception would be game servers, which are binary blobs, but box86/box64 can run those.

A number of businesses have switched to using arm EC2 servers from x86 EC2 servers for lower costs and things work fine on them.

Sometimes it can be ported, sometimes it can't.

x86 isn't going anywhere for a long time.

Imagine if AMD never existed. Everything about owning a computer would be worse. Likewise now we need Intel ( or someone else, perhaps a Chinese OEM) to make competition.