"Another challenge is the hardware that is becoming a bloatware of its own. The x86 configuration must be abandoned. It has so many bottlenecks in it's age old architecture that it makes it no longer possible to have substantial improvements and further (noticable) development in this direction are going to be very difficult, expensive and obsolete."
Dude, seriously, the x86 is bloat and needs to be abandoned line died out several years ago, far prior to Apple ditching the Power architecture. The switch to x86-64 has been a substantial improvement in the server space. The move to a multi-core architecture has also both improved performance of the OS and increased the performance per watt of the processor. While multi-threaded applications that take full advantage are more difficult to program, the multi-core architecture is likely to remain despite which instruction set is chosen and the development tools will catch up to give much of the performance benifits automatically. Yes, there is a lot that has to be sort of designed around with modern x86 processors, but these design criteria are a small price for the general expertise and experience that the general purpose computing industry has with the instruction set. The price of switching to a completely new instruction set far outways the benifits (look at the cost just for Apple and its platform partners, and realize they make up an incredibly small chunk of the market). The days of touting the need to kill of x86 are over for now.
Also, despite legacy support, major OS changes are still quite possible. For people who actually know anything about the underlying changes in Vista, they know it was a huge, huge change, with a vast level of code scraped and reworked. The windowing manager was completely changed, for example, and GDI+ was replace by WPF, while still maintianing a high level of compatability. The level of work necessary to do so is tremendous, but it is generally far more useful to the industry as a whole and the consumer, to make large advancements while maintaining existing compatability. What can be done in managed code using thw WPF api is frankly amazinging, most especially in how quickly the code can be written. So large advancement is still possible in this space, and still happening, despite your assertation that x86 and legacy support are dooming the general purpose world to remain mundane.
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"Another challenge is the hardware that is becoming a bloatware of its own. The x86 configuration must be abandoned. It has so many bottlenecks in it's age old architecture that it makes it no longer possible to have substantial improvements and further (noticable) development in this direction are going to be very difficult, expensive and obsolete."
Dude, seriously, the x86 is bloat and needs to be abandoned line died out several years ago, far prior to Apple ditching the Power architecture. The switch to x86-64 has been a substantial improvement in the server space. The move to a multi-core architecture has also both improved performance of the OS and increased the performance per watt of the processor. While multi-threaded applications that take full advantage are more difficult to program, the multi-core architecture is likely to remain despite which instruction set is chosen and the development tools will catch up to give much of the performance benifits automatically. Yes, there is a lot that has to be sort of designed around with modern x86 processors, but these design criteria are a small price for the general expertise and experience that the general purpose computing industry has with the instruction set. The price of switching to a completely new instruction set far outways the benifits (look at the cost just for Apple and its platform partners, and realize they make up an incredibly small chunk of the market). The days of touting the need to kill of x86 are over for now.
Also, despite legacy support, major OS changes are still quite possible. For people who actually know anything about the underlying changes in Vista, they know it was a huge, huge change, with a vast level of code scraped and reworked. The windowing manager was completely changed, for example, and GDI+ was replace by WPF, while still maintianing a high level of compatability. The level of work necessary to do so is tremendous, but it is generally far more useful to the industry as a whole and the consumer, to make large advancements while maintaining existing compatability. What can be done in managed code using thw WPF api is frankly amazinging, most especially in how quickly the code can be written. So large advancement is still possible in this space, and still happening, despite your assertation that x86 and legacy support are dooming the general purpose world to remain mundane.