The steady demise of x86

[Rhetorica]

Well, it's been a long time coming. macOS 27 drops Intel support, and it looks like projects such as Homebrew are preparing to follow suit. Given that Microsoft has been shipping ARM-powered laptops for even longer than Apple, how much longer do you reckon the entirety of the amd64 ecosystem will be considered mainstream? A decade? Less than that? (And will RISC-V ever achieve true world domination?)

[jeffburg]

It has been interesting to watch from the outside as the PC world has somehow not had to change their processor architecture in 40+ years.. like actually incredible when you think about it. Like if you imagine that your modern day 64 bit AMD thread ripper with 64 cores and 132 threads, when it boots, for a moment, acts and behaves exactly as a 16bit 8086 with only 64k of ram.... its totally mind-blowing. Like how the hell does that work.

On the other hand, for us in the Apple world, this transition thing has become sort of normal. I was there for PPC->intel and I am still here for Intel->ARM... it's always pretty smooth. One thing I was surprised by was that Apple was really determined to do the FULL transition. With PPC it was obvious why, PPC had no future in Personal Computers. But with Intel, it was a bit of a mystery to me. Why not just continue to support both??? Intel Xeon for the most powerful workstations and Apple Silicon for laptops and stuff? I was surprised they went so hard.

Anyway, this post goes a long way to not say anything about what @Rhetorica posted. But I only wanted to add that I think it seems like the PC side of the world and x86 versions of Windows and Intel will never go away. But I agree with the general sentiment that I think we will see a lot larger market for ARM PC hardware going into the future. Its just so far the support has been very bad for non x86 CPU's in the PC world... but its quickly getting better.

The thing I do miss about no longer having easy access to Intel hardware in the Mac world is that virtualization was SOOOOOOOO great when you had an intel CPU. VirtualBox, VMWare Fusion, QEMU, etc... such amazing tools when you have a matching CPU type... and sooooo limited when you have to emulate the underlying architecture.