In this age of cloud hosting of content and services/applications, there’s more need for parallel processing than ever before centrally, where the PC/x86 paradigm might not be the most effective.
Also, locally there’s decreasing need for PC/x86 compatibility, as we are moving to cloud-hosted applications accessed via standards-based Web browsers, and smartphones and tablets. Almost all smartphones and tablets use variants of the ARM architecture, and this is almost in-line with Sun’s notion of network computers 15 years ago.
This article is about the changes locally.
Maximum PC – ARMed and Dangerous- ARM vs. x86 – Which Will Win the Computing War-