At this point it seems more and more that x86 is still around purely due to legacy reasons and path-dependency. Intel's failure to execute on mobile really opened the door for ARM to have tons of resources over a decade thrown into it's development as a platform, and now the M1 is and extremely solid proof of concept that tentative forways into ARM on desktops/laptops/servers will absolutely warrant the shift in platforms. A few years for software ports and an extra 2 generations of chip improvements, and I think Intel's failure to execute on it's fab processes will just become a moot point. I have more confidence in AMD to pivot, and they have their GPU business as well. Intel may be relegated to aging obsolescence the same way HP and IBM did with their "big iron".

> Intel may be relegated to aging obsolescence the same way HP and IBM did with their "big iron".

Cough cough Itanium is an Intel-HP collaboration cough cough

Hah, true. That was absolutely the wrong chip at the wrong time, poorly implemented and lacking the software base of other platforms. I have no idea why they built the thing rather than put more resources behind Xeon, which was basically the end result anyway.

Multi-ISA chips have been announced from a couple of vendors (Loongson and Tachyum). The Loongson one does a MIPSish native ISA, MIPS, ARM, x86 and RISC-V, with the last three being slower.

https://www.zhihu.com/question/414069789 (needs Google Translate)

In the server market that could actually work, there are virtually no constraints on power or die size there.

There are plenty of constraints in the server markets. The primary ones are economic.