It is a little different now, in the 90’s there was so much low hanging fruit that new-thing could be multiple times better than old-thing. Arm might get a durable lead of, ya know, a couple or a dozen percentage points over x86. It isn’t like a quantitative difference so huge that it becomes a qualitative one.
In the 90’s, after all, aliens were coming to Earth to steal Intel’s chips.
Arm64 (M3) lags behind in some single core benchmarks vs Intel's high end desktop CPUs and is abysmal in multi-core benchmarks due to the limited number of cores, at least according to https://www.cpu-monkey.com.
Granted, the Intel CPU at the high end is pulling 250W+ (or was it 300W+?).
There are places for both architectures. I don't see x86 going anywhere unless Intel folds and ceases to design chips. Not sure AMD could power on alone given their current market share, though I certainly hope they could as a user of their chips in the desktop (and conversely, an M2 Air for my laptop).
I agree actually, I just wanted to set an upper-bound that nobody could really disagree with in the pro-ARM direction.
A minor quibble—high end desktop is a niche almost seemingly intentionally(?) ignored by ARM. Ampere puts out interesting server chips, and Apple puts out interesting laptop chips. What a high end desktop ARM chip? Apple’s max and ultra chips maybe, but they are pretty clearly a compromise with the fact that that market is pretty niche.
