Exactly. I have a lot of dev toolchains that are basically VMs -- the fact that I can't use them on the M1 is the thing keeping from jumping ship to the M1. I can't be the only person for whom this is true. I'm really surprised that nobody has done this yet, even if it's slow.

QEMU does do x86 emulation (and UTM provides a nice frontend) but it's not something I'd want to use often as the speed is horrendous.

Same here. Working with a new Dell XPS15 instead now.

x86 is dying in front of our eyes. I've been using M1 exclusively for work for couple of months. I was a bit sceptical, initially I thought tons of stuff will not work. But all except one thing works perfectly. That one thing being mssql server. Microsoft provides azure flavoured ARM docker image for mssql but it's shit slow - so slow I can't use it for development. So I'm running Ubuntu on Ryzen in the background (no monitor, just multipass/docker/k8s <<btw. multipass is awsome to spin vms using local dhcp - vms just feel like physical boxes>>). Once Microsoft provides mssql docker image for ARM, I'm ready to drop all Intel/AMD heaters, maybe after winter season?

ps. currently 2 out of 459 processes on my desktop are running in x86 emulation; sourcetree and some speech synthesis thing.

Well, I just got a new Thinkpad. In it, Ryzen 59something.

Granted, I never got to try M1s, but this is plenty faster than my the Macbook Pro "16 for anything, and I hardly ever hear the fan. Battery life is still something that Apple has an upper hand on, but other than that, x86 seems to still be doing well.

Dying? We have one decent ARM CPU that is limited to specific locked down platform/manufacturer. I believe that "x86 is dying" when the situation is reversed.

Conversely, I got an M1 machine for work and I've found that it's pretty useless unless your workload has been specifically tuned for it (like YouTube browsing or Twitter scrolling). There's no way in hell I'm using Rosetta to compile my x86 binaries, especially on a professional basis.