So is ARM the future at this point? After seeing how well Apple's M1 performed against a traditional AMD/Intel CPU, it has me wondering. I used to think that ARM was really only suited for smaller devices.
ARM is more of a tool kit to build different purpose built computers (you even see them show up in usb sticks). While x86 is particular ISA that has a long history behind it. So you may see something like 'Amazon builds its own ARM computers'. That means they spun their own boards, built their own toolchains (more likely recompiled existing ones), and probably have their own OS distro to match. Each one of those is a fairly large endeavor to do. When you see something like 'Amazon builds its own x86 boards', they have shaved out the other two parts of that and are focusing on hardware. That they are building their own means they see the value in owning the whole stack. Also if you have your own distro means you usually have to 'own' building the whole thing. So I can go grab an x86 gcc stack from my repo provider. They will need to act as the repo owner and build it themselves and keep up with the patches. Depending on what has been added that can be quite the task all by itself.