What is the long-term future for x86 as it gets squeezed from below by ARM?
Id think it'd really put the screws to Arm.
Even if Windows eventually dies, replaced by something ARM friendly, we are decades away of anything else achieving the same desktop market coverage across the globe.
Suddenly the conditions for replacing the majority of x86 based machines in the world over the next five to ten years start to look quite good.
Now the Steam Deck has an x64 CPU, but I’m running my heavyweight production Windows apps today on a Macbook Pro M1 running Windows 11 Arm in a VM which in turn is running Windows x64 apps in Windows on Arm’s cpu emulator and its a decent experience.
Really heavy apps like Visual Studio (not Code) and Altium (ee cad) are noticably slower, but run juat fine if I tune the VM for ‘gaming/CAD’ setings which basically allocates 12 GB RAM and 4 arm cores to the Windows VM.
Steam Deck does things differently — they have a sufficiently large Win32 compat layer that they aren’t running Windows in a VM at all. Now They don’t run this api layer on top of a x64 over arm layer, but I dont see why that won’t happen somewhere sometime soon…
Valve/Steam has the ‘runs existing Win32 apps without Windows working really well in production and they have a financial engine (games storefront) which is funding the support and improvement of this layer.
Both Apple and Microsoft (and others) have ‘run x86 apps on arm’ running really well in production today.
If Apple really wanted to run Win32 natively, they could do it without much new engineering investment. If Valve decides that an Arm chip makes more sense than their AMD chip in the Steam Deck, they could do it too.
Maybe some third party disruptor leverages Valve’s work and uses one of the (much better than Win11) Linux shells and creates some hardware like the Mac Mini M2 or the MSFT Arm dev kit, we’d see a real contender for Desktop Linux with full Win32 support on Arm.
The real question to me is does anyone outside of Apple have a current gen Arm CPU/GPU that has the performance? My Surface Pro X with Qualcomm Snapdragon is considerably slower than my Macbook Pro M1 running Windows apps in Coherence mode on Parallels Desktop inside a Windows VM. Parallels works, but I end up burning 6-8gb of ram to windows vm overhead and have the overhead of managing dual OSes to make this frankenstack work…
The target platform keeps being Windows x86/x64 in what game developers are concerned.
Since Windows CE days for ARM, the amount of device sales have hardly been spectacular, hence Project Volterra, which isn't taking the world of Windows development by storm in any way.
OS/2's main problem was that it was only preinstalled on expensive IBM hardware that almost nobody wanted to buy when cheaper hardware was available from IBM PC clone manufacturers like Compaq. The hardware also used MCA, which was more expensive than ISA thanks to IBM's royalties and it was a pain to configure. Nobody wanted that. That sealed OS/2's fate.
That is not mentioning the horrible marketing campaign for OS/2 Warp that made OS/2 sound like it was related to narcotics.
Anyway, had OS/2 been on all of the IBM PC clones rather than Windows, then history would have selected OS/2 over Windows.
Android on Windows requires Windows 11, is US only and uses Amazon store, hardly a success.
WSL is being a success to drive Windows sales, because as Microsoft learned from Apple's customer base, it turns out many developers only care about having a POSIX environment and couldn't care less to support Linux vendors Additionally it helps selling Windows containers on top of Docker tooling, for the same kind of customers.
That is the target, nothing else.
Likewise I have given up on the Year of Desktop Linux when Windows 7 came to be, and even with the latest hiccups, I don't see a reason that it will ever change.
ChromeOS and Android, even if running the Linux kernel, aren't a GNU userland, nor a replacement for the Windows workloads that matter to the people that keep going for Windows all around the globe.
So unless Windows on ARM is a success (so far it has failed at it), Intel and AMD don't have much to worry about for desktop workloads.
I have also seen hotel employees use property management system software on iPads, no on premise server or Windows required.
I would not be surprised if there is a lot of opportunity for change here. It is just so much easier to train and troubleshoot on a machine that has little (or no?) possibility of malware, can be fixed by just swapping it out with a replacement and logging into the app, uses less power, and is cheaper.
The majority of the world among 195 recognised countries + others, isn't as lucky.
I had x86 laptops and they were great. But when running on battery, there is always those glances up at the battery indicator every few minutes and thinking about when I am going to have to get to a charger again. Until you have left that behind, with a super lightweight laptop, you just can't understand what a game changer it is.
I think Microsoft is eager to get to that experience for their users. I hope they will keep making the investment to get there.