As someone developing HPC applications, I generally don't care either, as long as the hardware has good fundamentals, and is well supported by the available compilers and profiling tools.
Honestly at this point the only reason that I'm aware of to prefer Intel for my workloads is the awesomeness of VTune.
How's the quality of the equivalent AMD or Arm tooling these days?
1) Steam library.
2) And the just works combo of ATX & the ability to use any ISO on almost any x86 machine.
I'm personally scared if x86 dies the open market of ATX and bring your own OS won't exist as every company will just lock you in to only there stuff on their devices.
I share this fear, and have for a while. x86/the WinTel era has offered a lot of computing freedom, both hardware and OS wise and I believe we are in real danger of losing that. Not just because of an architecture change in isolation either, but also with the recent age verification stuff, and pushes for requiring "verified platforms" to access certain services, we are quickly heading down a proprietary-OS only world if you actually want to interact with web services.
An open ecosystem in the way that historically emerged around the PC platform seems to be a completely orthogonal issue.
Reminds me when people wanted Intel to die and then they realized AMD started raising their prices with no competition and they tough that maybe AMD isn't their friend and is like any other for profit corporation.
So I have no idea why people want to see the most open PC ecosystem die. What kind of short sighted masochism is this?
Another part is the desire for a fresh start. x86 carries a lot of baggage. There's this idea that a new CPU architecture would somehow stop holding us back. Problem with that idea is that for the most part, x86 doesn't hold us back.
Then of course there's the remnants of the old RISC vs CISC debate that never quite died away.
People will always be fascinated by the what-ifs and if-onlys - "if only Sun had survived to the cloud era" is my personal favorite. It's harmless fun.
I edit a ton of 4K video, photos off my Sony Mirrorless, write articles, web, etc.
It is by far the fastest computer I’ve ever used. I have never once known or cared if anything is running x86.
ARM for laptops is a monster leap forward
Everyone who uses a tablet or smartphone obviously doesn’t care.
Anyone on a Mac doesn’t care, and even on windows, only very performance sensitive people would care if Prism isn’t doing its thing.
You’d essentially be left with AAA PC gamers and other performance sensitive people, which are a small percentage of overall users.
(known as "IPP Everywhere" in the Linux universe)
It makes sense, seeing that CUPS is used on all of them.
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/arm/apps-on-arm-x8...
> Note that emulation only supports user mode code and does not support drivers; any kernel mode components must be compiled as Arm64.
Yes, Prism isn't as good as Rosetta.
Chromebooks are the B2B SaaS of hardware where the buyer is not the user - mostly school systems.
Unless something bad really happens on Windows land, users will care for a long time about native x86 support, Microsoft not being as hardliner as Apple, is the main reason all Windows on ARM efforts keep failing.
(By "decent", I mean that it can handle their particular software, and with acceptable performance.)
None of the machines I regularly use are x86-native, this has been the case for 4 years now. I only care because deploying x86 containers is still a thing.
I might be getting a gaming PC at some point, but there are very few titles I'm actually really interested in.
it seems to at par, if not better than the other offering.
Back when homebrew was source build first and Linux was first class, it was the best. Now it has become the thing it replaced, MacPorts.
E.g., does it refuse to run on an emulator? Or some bizarre license issue?
I'm able to play most 5-10 year old games that aren't tied to DRMs at 30-60 fps on a Pi [2] (and certainly on Ampere) using box64 and an AMD GPU (or Nvidia on an Ampere system), haven't spent much time with FEX-emu though.
[1] https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2025/system76-built-fastes...
[2] https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2024/use-external-gpu-on-r...
Portal 2 was hitting over 100 FPS. Half-Life 2 and DOOM 2016 hovered around 60 FPS. Shadow of the Tomb Raider and Control mostly stayed above 30 FPS, while The Witcher 3 and God of War usually hung out in the low to mid 40s.
- https://interfacinglinux.com/2025/06/30/fex-emu-gaming-on-th...
If I pull an x86 machine or even laptop off the shelf, I'm like 90% sure I can perpetually support that machine for 30 or so years with the latest linux kernel.
For arm, I'm almost guaranteed that the only kernel support I can get is their custom kernel, which I'd have to scrape out of their custom OS. That means being locked into a vendored 3.10 linux kernel forever because there was never any real effort to upstream drivers into the kernel.
It's frankly a bit bizarre that it's so bad. x86 just works even with the latest CPUs. ARM doesn't.
Sure, you might have have a little "optimised" ASM for some specific conversions, but that's always just performance, and a driver even touching bulk data on the CPU means you're already in the slow path.
Stuff like how the busses are enumerated, cache coherency specifics, and interoperability with other devices (some mobile SoCs can be a grab bag of different GPU/Display block/Video encoder/Image processing/whatever else) is waayyyyy more important from what I've seen/.
And while we all hate on stuff like PCI and ACPI, at least it's (kinda) standard and (somewhat) works.
Also: https://github.com/MattPD/cpplinks/blob/master/assembly.risc...