I think x86 has a future in consumer hardware, but it's not going to be in endlessly chasing maximum theoretical performance by making CPUs ever more power hung

I think x86 has a future in consumer hardware, but it's not going to be in endlessly chasing maximum theoretical performance by making CPUs ever more power hungry. Performance per watt is now the key figure for anything aside from high end enthusiast PCs (and even then, many enthusiasts can't actually make good use of more raw power than is currently on the table). With that in mind, my thought is that it'd make sense to split off gigahertz-chasing enthusiast CPUs into a dedicated product line and brand while mainstream CPUs focus squarely on excellent zero-tweaking perf per watt.