I didn't mean that the progress we've seen is because of x86, but because of the PC standardization. Imagine if we had a couple of competing systems like IBM P

I didn't mean that the progress we've seen is because of x86, but because of the PC standardization. Imagine if we had a couple of competing systems like IBM PC, Atari, Commodore and Mac, each with 20-40% market share, each with their own chipsets. Do you think we would have 30 GFLOP single threaded / 700 GFLOP multithreaded performance built in commodity systems now? I don't think so. In mobile space it's kinda similar: Only because ARM was able to get such a dominant position in chip design we have the current speedup rate. The thing is however, that the main chipset is not the whole story, it seems to me that the way those dozens of subsystems work together nowadays just isn't designed well - as you said it just barely works. Having a standard would help in that every subsystem manufacturer could just provide drivers for his part and the OS would then know what to do with it, it's not necessary anymore for the assembler to do all that work.