In the post Moore's law era my hunch is that the eventual "winner", if there is one, will be decided based on software not hardware. So far the main use cases

In the post Moore's law era my hunch is that the eventual "winner", if there is one, will be decided based on software not hardware. So far the main use cases that have pushed the computational performance envelope were hype-driven. In such a climate people will just accept developing costs, lock-in risks etc. as the cost of entering the bubble early enough. In "normalized" conditions the focus shifts back to developer and user productivity and cost-efficiency. We are slowly entering the commoditised HPC era, but HPC was always a volatile domain precisely because of its highly specialized nature. The broad, general purpose use and (relatively) easy set of tools of the x86 cpu era provided a stability that is unlikely to repeat. The vector accelerator market is (conceptually) for the CPU vendors to lose because they can create a more productive development environment that unifies CPU/GPU. To paraphrase, users dont care about GPU, they care about performant applications.