What will happen when x86 inevitably becomes obsolete? Will we

>>58916705
why would that be inevitable?

>>58916714
Because everything does eventually and intel can barely squeeze out more performance from their CPUs, or it's because they have monopoly and are lazy depending on your perspective. You'd think with all the money they spend on R&D they would at least have something

>>58916705
>What will happen when x86 inevitably becomes obsolete?
Lots of things.

>Will we be able to emulate all old software we've accumulated so far?
Probably. The ISA would basically be dead otherwise.

>Will there be a massive effort to port everything?
No fucking way.

>Should we worry?
You should worry about intel trying to create another Itanium and force the market to adopt it.

>>58916705
I'm not a programmer, but I assume you could just write different compilers and recompile the existing code? Or am I a dumbass?

>>58916705
x86 is effectively permanent now. Remember that saying about how Plan 9 never replaced Unix because Unix, though it had and has many rough edges and gotchas, is good enough? And Plan 9 was/is better, but not better enough to go through the massive effort of switching to it? Same deal with instruction sets. Sure ARM is gonna have its uses in the low-power space, and we'll continue to see off hyper-parallel GPU-like things, but the general purpose jack-of-all-trades CPU is gonna remain x86.

>>58916705
You don't have to worry about x86 becoming obsolete, nobody would want to upgrade knowing that 40 years of software would suddenly be incompatible.

This is why IA-64 failed and x86-64 didn't. The fact that it worked with x86.

>>58916705
You can emulate everything, why not x86? Things like DOSbox and JSLinux are already emulating a full x86 CPU.. even when run under x86 itself!

Regarding ports, I wonder if anybody would be interested. Our current CPUs are already "emulating" x86 in a sort of way, as in no modern x64 cpu actually runs x64 assembly in the silicon, rather they implement each instruction in CPU's specific microcode. The reason our x64 CPUs keep being x64 is mostly because there is market for x64 computers. If that vanished, what reason would there be to port x86 software?

>>58918150
And the fact that Itanium sucked. It excelled in synthetic benchmark and was awfully slow in everything real world.

>>58916745
>intel can barely squeeze out more performance from their CPU
that has nothing to do with x86

>>58916745
Intel have no competition so they're not releasing exciting stuff to market. Big difference.