Also, if you use a Mac with M1, you'd quickly realise how much of a work intel needs to catch up. Boy, it's so pleasant to use while being cool and quiet. Intel needs to run for the money and hope that no one figures out how to replicate Apple's success in the non-macos space and start eating intel's gold pot of datacenter CPUs. AWS Graviton?
What dependency do you think most users and business have on the instruction set architecture, even if you ignore that you can translate?
Consumers probably less so but businesses will definitely care. Translation might be an option for some. However, Rosetta currently only supports limited translation [0].
[0] - https://developer.apple.com/documentation/apple-silicon/abou...
Written in assembly language?
Finding the source isn't free. Finding the archived compiler isn't free. Finding a machine that still can run the compiler isn't free. Re-writing the app isn't free.
A lot of the low-level stuff in standard libraries, third-party libraries and in our own code rely on platform details like calling conventions, which will almost certainly be different for a different architecture. Sure it can probably be rewritten, and a lot of code in the standard library already has generic high-level variants as fallback, but it's not going to be a simple recompile for us.
By extension then, our customers rely on the ISA as long as they rely on our application, and our software is key to their operation.
Not really.
Over my career I used x86, MIPS, PPC, SPARC, x86, and ARM machines. With the exception of x86 Windows boxes, they all looked and felt mostly the same. The Mac in front of me and the Linux laptop to my left incidentally use x86 CPUs but, at the core, they are both Unix-like machines and that's what I use them for. I don't care about binary compatibility and what ISA the machine uses inside it.
For the most part, I'm convinced the bulk of this transition has already happened. If you were running highly-parallelized code or needed to switch to specialty hardware, you've probably done so already.
> On the other hand, x86 is so ubiquitous for PC that it would take a sea change for Apple Silicon to take over.
Not just Apple silicon, but for ARM to take over. Even the best compatibility layers for x86/ARM still present a massive performance hit, and there's otherwise no real incentive for the bulk of PC owners to switch over. I say this as the kid who grew up with a first-gen Raspberry Pi on their wishlist: x86 is an immovable force, and it will be decades before it loses support in the mainline Linux kernel. Even if Apple, Microsoft, Amazon and every other Fortune 500 company made a mad-dash transition to ARM (which they won't), you still couldn't dethrone x86 in terms of support and install-base.
On the other hand, x86 is so ubiquitous for PC that it would take a sea change for Apple Silicon to take over. Users and businesses are entrenched and this isn't the first time that Apple has run a different architecture from the rest of the PC crowd. I, for one, prefer my x86 MBP to the newfangled M1 because of RAM, compatibility, external display support, and number of ports. These limitations are all a function of implementation, not inherent to Apple Silicon, but they influence my preferences nonetheless.
COVID-19 has changed the way that work is balanced against everything else in our lives, and I view its impact on the chip market as demand creation rather than a demand spike. We will never go back 100% to the way that things were prior to the pandemic; big shocks all have that in common. The hybrid model of work from home as a complement to office work means that people/companies will need to buy and maintain more hardware.
I share your hope that this doesn't turn out the way the delayed nodes did. Intel's 10nm and 7nm setbacks started in the Krzanich days during the doldrums of the PC glut. People were mobile, phone innovations were booming, and no substantial PC advancements came to the fore during that time. I think we can give Intel some benefit of the doubt and assume that they aren't dumb enough to repeat the error of announcing a road map for which there is no road map...especially because the tick-tock model is already a thing of the past and exerts no expectations nowadays.