I think it goes a bit beyond "keeping a close eye on"... Apple's employed Chris Lattner (the creator/primary author of LLVM) for a number of years now, and I t

I think it goes a bit beyond "keeping a close eye on"... Apple's employed Chris Lattner (the creator/primary author of LLVM) for a number of years now, and I think LLVM is widely regarded as being a pretty major part of their plans going forward. (And it's not just Apple, either -- Nvidia's using LLVM for their OpenCL implementation, for example.) As for x86 vs. ARM...in the high-performance single-core/multi-core area (up to say, 8 cores or so), I think x86, ugly as it is, is likely to remain entrenched. There have been a hell of a lot of dollars and man-hours pumped in to making it (single-threaded) fast over the last couple decades, and in that area it may actually have some technical advantages over a cleaner ISA (such as ARM, though ARM isn't exactly the epitome of RISC purity). Two things off the top of my head -- a) the instruction encoding, as insane as it is, allows pretty dense code, meaning good I-cache utilization, and b) the two-operand instruction format simplifies dependency-checking and forwarding logic, for which hardware costs run O(n^2) (where n is proportional to operands-per-instruction and issue width). In the "manycore" area though, I think the power and area costs of decoding the x86 ISA will be a more significant disadvantage (this may have something to do with why the power consumption of Larrabee prototypes was rumored to be so enormous). Tilera, for example, makes manycore chips based on MIPS, which I'd say is a somewhat cleaner ISA RISC-wise (meaning better-suited for small/efficient hardware implementation) than ARM. So, if manycore is indeed the future, I'd say there is definitely hope for avoiding a completely x86-monopolized world...