The End of x86?

I had a phone conversation with one of their managers about a year ago (I was trying to see could I get a sample PCIe board) and they are damned expensive, so it would only make sense if you have something that 1) parallelizes very well, 2) actually needs the performance, 3) runs on Linux* or can be easily ported to their architecture and 4) you have high enough volume to make their overheads worthwhile. On the plus side, they seemed were very willing to lend their engineering team to help port to their architecture (as part of the devkit cost). Sadly, they don't have evaluation boards - you pretty much have to buy a devkit to evaluate it and the devkits costs approx. 5 times the price of the lowest end PCIe board (I'm not sure what hardware this included and afaik its a once off up-front cost).

(* Running on Linux doesn't mean it magically works, but the Tilera PCIe boards can run Linux, so it at least makes porting a bit easier)

But that doesn't change the facts: Intel DOES have competition to their high-end market from GPUs and the likes of Tilera. I can see the newer ARM processors starting to challenge their midrange line and obviously with Atom too.

Just today, I was thinking about getting an ARM Cortex A8 powered BeagleBoard xM as adesktop linux box replacement.

I expect ARM's transition to be quite different though--with the highest ends of their business moving in only a couple product cycles, and the lower ends of their business sticking with 32 bit indefinitely.

PowerPC owns gaming. MIPS seems to still be common in networking devices. ARM is mobile and the rest is Intel and noise.

Seems to me that the killer feature ARM has isn't technical at all, it's that you can buy a core, graft on a DSP if your core doesn't have one (OMAPs already do) and your secret sauce needs a DSP (half the phone vendors have their own audio enhancement stuff or echo cancellation code that they think makes the difference) graft on a mobile chip and fab your own part. Then you add memory, flash, a battery and you've pretty much got a phone.

I'm not aware of any medium volume products that use custom Intel based hardware, I have no idea what the costs or terms are but I'm under the impression that unless you're going to make 5million chips, it's just not worth it with Intel parts. Now say intel opensourced an SSE echo killer and built some kind of 2watt Atom with GSM built in style chipset and it cost $15, I bet you'd start thinking ARM was in trouble.

Intel can pretty much build the highest performing per dollar chips, they can build them cheaper than anyone else, they have much more reliable processes than anyone else and they've shown time and time again that when they put their mind to it they can compete with anyone else.

I'd need to see some really compelling evidence that ARM was moving in to the serving market in any meaningful way. I thought they had a match with PowerPC, thought so with AMD, thought Linux was going to make alternative platforms viable, and probably thought they were in trouble several other times but they are fiendishly good.