Yes, the pace at which ARM got so good is breathtaking and it could surpass x86 in the future. But like I said in the first post, now's not the time yet.

I'm not sure ARM can keep this breakneck speed up for long anymore; since the A75 the performance increases, at least on a per-Watt and per-clock basis, have slowed down considerably. Which is why ARM octacores in smartphones went from 4+4 to 2+6 and now 1+1+6, with one highest performance core, one high performance one and finally 6 economy cores.

Same reason they license Intel x86 now.

Apple isn't using off-the-shelf A75 cores, so it's ultimately a redundant point.

Apple over the last 5 years has increased it's SoC performance by a factor of 2.98x.
Intel? 28%.

https://www.anandtech.com/show/16226/apple-silicon-m1-a14-deep-dive/4


The fact we can even have a discussion about Apple's Firestorm cores in the same context as high-performant x86 cores is a testament to where Apple's SoC performance currently sits... Right up the top with the monolithic x86 chips rather than lumped in with Intel Atoms or AMD Jaguar like what historically happens with ARM SoC's.

Now when talking about your regular ARM SoC's like Snapdragon, that's an entirely different ballgame... Qualcomm isn't able to keep up with Apple, which is why Android has traditionally laggard behind Apple iPhone in terms of absolute performance and energy efficiency.
Android itself probably hasn't helped there either as it's a fairly bloated and inefficient OS all things considered. - Yet I wouldn't own anything but the latest Samsung Galaxy Note...

The iPhone 12 Pro for example can offer 3x the performance of the Galaxy S20 Ultra's Snapdragon 865 in certain CPU tasks, that's a massive divide and showcases what custom silicon can do when leveraged appropriately from a vertically integrated company like Apple.

Throughout the 30 odds years technology has existed in it's popular form, x86 has endured numerous adversarial instruction sets, from RISC to PowerPC and Motorola. I believe this instruction set will never end, but Intel needs to decide whether they will allow it to be released to the public or die.

No.

Simply put, Xbox is going the third party/multiplatform route with it's Gamepass and ''release everything on PC'' strategy, while Sony is going knee deep on the ''mature'' segment of the industry, focusing more and more on power and cutting edge technology rather than innovation.

But truth be told, neither of them would have the manpower, talent, or IPs/Games to pull a ''Nintendo''. People always says that Nintendo is doing their own stuff when Nintendo starts winning the sales race, but there is some truth to that, in the sense that only Nintendo could do the stuff that they do.

Edit: Oh, I seemed to have missed the OP's point. Still, my point stands. MS is halfhay on it's way to being third party, so that won't matter to them, and Sony will be commited to the PS5 archtecture for the next 7 years or so.

At the moment Intel, AMD and VIA are the companies with x86 licenses... VIA pretty much sticks to niche' markets by leveraging Cyrix and Centaur (WinChip) derived technologies for it's Nano chips.

Transmeta tried a different approach by leveraging code morphing with it's VLIW "x86 compatible" processors... But failed to gain headway for various reasons with it's Crusoe and Efficeon chips.

However... We need to keep in mind that x86 chips today from the likes of Intel and AMD aren't really CISC processors anymore... They are actually RISC... They do this by dynamically translating complex instructions into simpler RISC-like micro instructions due to efficiency reasons.

Other companies have tried to leverage binary translation to achieve full ARM or x86 compatibility.. Notably Snapdragon and Microsoft with it's surface devices... And Intel with Atom to allow Android+ARM software ecosystem to operate on Atom x86 SoC's.

Unless Zhaoxin combined with VIA manages to make headway (unlikely) we are likely stuck with the AMD/Intel duopoly for the x86 market with ARM encroaching in x86. (I.E. Servers/Workstations.)

Is what it is. If ARM offers better price/performance/efficiency, then I welcome it.

Intel and AMD both have ARM licenses... And that actually puts nVidia in a pretty enviable long-term position as they will be the proud owners of ARM.

Either way, plenty of approaches can be taken to retain backwards compatibility irrespective of CPU ISA, it's really up to manufacturers.

One thing should be kept in mind, Apple's ARM achieves its high efficiency also by being a SoC, at the expense of configuration flexibility and expandability: also the RAM, although on separated chips, is included in the same package, so any config needs its custom package. This is not a problem for Apple, as it will just make the limited number of different packages it needs across its range of products, neither it would be for console makers, that would need an even smaller number of different packages, as few as just one, or two if they make base and premium models, but doing the same for the countless configs PCs and other generic devices may have just choosing different GPUs and RAM size would make the all-in-one-package approach a financial bloodbath. In future who knows, both ARM and Intel could try scaled up ARM CPUs like Apple, and NVidia, that owns the architecture, could decide to follow them too, although I'm not sure it would consider attractive to put resources in the PC CPU market when it can profit a lot more in the PC GPU one. So, with PC staying with x86 and BC needs, x86 will remain an easy choice for MS and Sony consoles. Who knows, with IBM licensing Power architecture to anybody wanting it, we could even see a comeback of that architecture in the computing power range suitable for PCs and home consoles. But the real regret we should have is what could be now the PC hadn't Intel bought DEC Alpha just to bury it (although I'm quite sure it used all the tech it could scavenge from it to regain desktop PC performance leadership after six years of AMD domination with the first Athlon).

X86 pretty much is in death bed sort of speak (Nvidia didnt throw 40B$ at ARM for nothing), as for MS & Sony They’ll drop it for sure in the 10th gen (PS6/Series 2), the only hurdle for them is to adapt a viable X86 BC Emulation, which they’ll achieve eventually (Similar to Rosetta)

While apple is definetly the bigest player out there, they are in no position t influence the market in any way as they dont play along with anybody. They make everything in hoise to the software and hardware. The only thing that comes to mind that they dont make is the screens that come from samsung. Even if ARM takes off by apple and even nintendo, i dont see that being the norm any time soon. There sure is a possibility of that but after seing the results of the M1 i was not impresed. I still think AMD was a head by them using a lower node and amd limiting their pcie lanes so much on their 4000' series apu, that is the bigest limiting factor of why their graphics score is so low. they could easyly doube the amount of gpu cores in each chip. Im pretty sure they will when ddr5 becomes available.

First of all, if mid-men refresh happens this gen again, it certainly will be x86-based as well. If we look to provided Apple example - it took them at least 4 years from what we know to plan and make this transition to ARM happen and that's also taking into account that they've had engineers working on such SoCs for iPhones and iPads for years prior to that. Something that both Sony and Microsoft don't have. It all comes down to both companies having to make such decision already which they obviously didn't make, so ARM mid-men refresh is out of question.

Now, let's assume that the potential next-gen would be the time that both companies will think about moving away from X86.

I'll first start with Sony, because it's more easier in my opinion. Sony is not a big tech company nowadays, far from it. They simply don't have the resources to keep a state of engineers to build SoCs for them, like Apple does. So, the only way for them would be to buy an existing solution for partners and maybe ask them to make some tweaks (similar to what Nintendo did with Tegra and nVidia). The problem is - BC. We already see that all backwards compatibility on Playstation consoles is built around the idea of having the same or double core GPU config. Like PS4 -> PS4 Pro. PS4 Pro just had two PS4 GPUs stuck together and running at higher clock. PS5 GPU has the exact same core config as PS4 Pro does, but once again running at higher clocks.
So, the conclusion is - PS6 going ARM way is possible if x86 will end up at a really huge disadvantage over ARM by the time PS6 is gonna enter the planning phase (which I don't think is quite likely), but it will most likely end up in PS6 having no backwards compatibility with PS4 and PS5 games.

Now, for Microsoft. Recently there has been a Bloomberg report that Microsoft is looking into building their own ARM chips in house, just like Apple does. But as it is usual for Microsoft nowadays, the main goal is to use them for Azure cloud. Unlike Sony, Microsoft has the capability and resources to hire engineer to build their own ARM SoCs if they really see some advantage there. And given that all existing Xbox One games and Xbox Series X|S games are running in Hyper-V containers from what we know, I don't think it will be an impossible task for MS engineers to prepare some low-level command translation software like Rosetta to make this virtualized containers running on a completely different architecture. The problem with Microsoft is - will they really see a reason to put quite a lot of resources into such transition for Xbox hardware which is not selling really well? I don't think so. It's still a big question mark about will we even see the next Xbox console iteration or not and we are talking about Microsoft investing a ton of resources into making x86 - ARM transition for the very small and almost irrelevant for them part of their business.
So, the conclusion for Microsoft is - they can pull it off without any issues if they will see the need for that (which they probably won't)

P.S. Also, the ARM chips main advantages over x86 are scalability and power-efficiency. It does not seem like these things are the priority for both Sony and Microsoft consoles.