I agree that it will be a large power penalty, but the alternative may end up being the long tail of software suffering subtle concurrency correctness issues th

I agree that it will be a large power penalty, but the alternative may end up being the long tail of software suffering subtle concurrency correctness issues that just aren't there on x86. It may sacrifice some of their advantage but avoid being known as the CPU equivalent of a Ford Pinto. There's still plenty of room to undercut Intel's historical 60% gross margins even if you're shipping largely interchangeable products. The other way it might play out is a race to very high core counts as the main differentiator, providing single socket performance worth the hassle of not being able to run everything on it in a rock solid way. Postgres will work great. That redis fork that adds threads maybe not. Or Intel may start to allow developers to relax memory correctness guarantees on a process by process granularity in their own progress to high core counts. It's hard to imagine their current methods scaling to 1k cores. But if you asked me ten years ago I'd have said they wouldn't have made it to 56 cores, either.