It's difficult when it comes down to actually using these chips. It's great if you're developing everything yourself like the operating system and applications.

But that isn't how the world is setup. No one does the whole thing anymore it's a combined work of hundreds of thousands of people past and present.

What good is an x86 competitor in the desktop space if we have no meaningful software to run on it?

One wrong answer to that question is binary translation, lets translate x86 software to run on our new chip. So we're still locked into x86 as that will always give Intel the advantage if we're sidelined translating all their instructions. It would never be as fast.

Trying to maintain two distinct coding languages on a single platform is very difficult, one always starts to get "must need" apps that aren't available for the other and it causes a swaying in purchasing decisions.

A lot of people point to PowerPC as a good example of how a contender can work in the market, but this is Apple building the operating system, marketing it, making a lot of the must have apps to entice consumers and in the end it only took one bad roadmap for them to jump to another architecture.

SPARC, gone. MIPS, fallen to integrated. The last hope is ARM right? No. If you look at Mobile ARM is dominating, it's Mobiles version of x86 on the desktop. Intel can't get their foot in the door largely for the same reasons ARM can't get a foothold in the desktop market. Software.

With Android it's a little easier due to the JIT compiler they use that allows a level of abstraction between the hardware and the software, essentially running a virtualized processing environment that is processor agnostic as long as the virtual machine has been optimised for the architecture it's executing on but that situation isn't so strong on Desktop and Server where interpreted languages like JAVA are not holding up the core foundations of computing but are merely actors within a much larger ensemble cast.

I think and this is probably a bleak outlook to many that the Desktop as we see it will fade away and will be replaced by Notebooks, Tablets and Smart Phones exclusively. When you want a large display you'll just wirelessly connect to one with one of those devices. And I foresee ARM and perhaps Intel having that entire market to themselves.

With that change I see the death of desktop Windows, Mac OS and Desktop Linux. Replaced with iOS, Windows Mobile, Android and other Linux based mobile derivatives that look and function very different to the desktop distros we currently have available.

I see the desktop becoming a niche just like PDA's and Smart Phones once were before the iPhone showed up. Something a few geeks had and they were cumbersome.

What I'm getting at here is that our desktop software, our pokey software is going the way of the dinosaur and our mobile operating systems are going to be elevated and replace them and that is the only way we're going to get competition to x86 on the desktop, by replacing the desktop with a Smartphone.