Never Bet Against x86

On the other hand, most ARM-based CPUs, even those of Apple, have quite poor performance for things like arithmetic operations with floating-point numbers or with big integer numbers. Geekbench results do not reflect at all the performance of such applications.

This is a serious problem for those who need computers for solving problems of scientific/technical/engineering computing.

During the half of century when IBM PC compatible computers have been dominant, even if the majority of the users never exploited the real computational power of their CPUs, buying a standard computer would automatically provide at a low price a good CPU for the "power" users that need such CPUs.

Now, with the consumer-oriented ARM-based CPUs that have been primarily designed for smartphones and laptops, and not for workstations and servers, such computers remain good for the majority of the users, but they are no longer good enough for those with more demanding applications.

I hope that Intel/AMD based computers will remain available for a long time, to be able to still buy computers with good performance per dollar, when taking into account their throughput for floating-point and big integer computations.

Otherwise, if only the kinds of computers made by Apple and Qualcomm would be available, users like me would have to buy workstations and servers with a many times lower performance per dollar than achievable with the desktop CPUs of today.

This kind of evolution already happened in GPUs, where a decade ago one could buy a cheap GPU like those bought by gamers, but which nevertheless also had excellent performance for scientific FP64 computing. Then such GPUs have disappeared and the gaming GPUs of today can no longer be used for such purposes, for which one would have to buy a "datacenter" GPU, but those cost an arm and a leg.