No way. If anything, x86/amd64 are on the way out.
How? There's been more of them than ever
Because they’re horribly inefficient - power hungry, hot, just so unsuited to portable devices. More and more hardware (and software) is being made for the ARM64 platform - Apple Silicon really blew a lot of the industry out of the water and we’re beginning to see more laptops with ARM64, and that means more and more software (and thus, emulators) will be made for ARM64, and more consumer hardware will be ARM64
Even Intel is starting to move away from x86 toward arm and RISC-V. They own the patent on x86 and make money licensing it so that should tell you how good arm has become.
An actively cooled modern ARM SoC would certainly fit way better for handheld PCs than X86... If not for the need to support decades of legacy software. I believe it will take white a while for us to see X86 go away, and in the meantime, I'll heavily prefer the X86 handhelds over the ARM ones... But a day will indeed come when this logic flips.
There is always the phone + controller grip option. I do that whenever I want to play something later than ps1
I absolutely love my GPD Win 4 for PC gaming and higher-end emulation, but not so much for older retro gaming. It’s heavy to hold and it’s a bother to think about what TDP settings to use for better battery life and remember to adjust them. So there’s still a place on my shelf for my Anbernic handheld. 🙂 Not to mention the massive price difference and how even the lower-end x86 handhelds aren’t in the budget for many folks. There’s still a market for ARM-based handhelds and although it may be getting saturated, I don’t think it’s actually dying.
I think the issue has always been software. Hardware, once built, is cheap. Supporting software is expensive.
If windows on arm or steam gets its act together and we have better arm support then x86 doesn't make any sense for handhelds.
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