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Personally, I don't see this happening soon. 64-bit ARM is in it's infancy (http://www.eetimes.com/electronics-news/4210884/ARM-64-bit-C...), and in the timeframes given >4GB of memory is going to be standard.

Getting a new CPU instruction set going is hard work - the original AMD64 instruction set took 3-4 years to get mainstream Linux support, and without any hardware or software emulators out there to aide development...

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You think it would require much more work than just a recompile? With the similarities between iOS/OSX and Apple's investment in the LLVM toolchain I see the switch going smoother than PPC -> x86.

For any performance intensive tasks, yes. Especially gaming.

That said, the entire computer industry is going ARM (Windows 8, all mobile platforms, etc.) so I'm guessing that the transition will be easier.

There's much less tight x86 assembly for critical performance areas than was commonplace 10 years ago.

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