Meanwhile, Apple uses precious chip real estate for niche applications like ProRes transcoding.In contrast while x86-64 cleaned up a lot about x86, chip designers still cite the cruft in each, especially the latter as one reason why x86 chips are bigger and hotter than they otherwise would be.
I think Apple's primary reason why they are switching to their own CPUs (which are the result of a decade of development on the mobile device side) is not so much performance, but their ability to customize them for their very specific target group. But many of the things they are doing don't easily translate to other segments. For example, they get significant performance advantages by integrating the (unified) RAM on the CPU package, but that doesn't easily scale to the amounts of RAM that are needed for workstations or servers. Similarly, while apparently a sufficiently high percentage of Apple users use ProRes to justify baking it in silicon, in the overall market that is a small niche.I would agree however that an emphasis on tight integration between hardware and software and custom chip design is a benefit of ARM’s business model rather than ISA.
Well, there's been talk about ARM taking over for more than a decade and it hasn't happened. Have things changed enough to make it happen now? We'll see. But I think a lot of the perception is just driven by Intel's stumbles on the manufacturing side. They still have very good designs. Next week we'll learn more about Alder Lake, which looks like the most innovative CPU they've launched in years.That x86 has 90% of the market share everywhere else is a function of ARM only just only just starting to seriously compete outside of mobile rather than an x86 processor advantage. And indeed x86 may yet win out. An entrenched ecosystem is difficult though not impossible to overcome and as you say AMD and Intel won’t stand still.