I know, I really can’t wait for the official support either. And I’ve also been thinking that it looks like ARM is going for the throat. Now that compilers can do all the optimization, it won’t be too long before someone starts putting in a self modifying compiler of sorts for programs to optimize themselves for a given hardware configuration and ARM and RISC is making that possible.
The biggest thing that was going for x86 was human readable machine code and being able to use instructions that were easy to tell what they were doing. With RISC machines though, your multiplication instructions may take dozens of steps but completes one instruction per clock cycle, vs one instructions taking multiple machine cycles per instruction. So when you have something that performs many instructions, it has to do all of those, regardless if certain parts of the instruction’s results get thrown away, but with RISC and ARM optimizations, you can leave the unnecessary instructions/results out at compile time.
Once ARM and RISC machines can operate at the same speeds and can pipeline the same ways, etc, I really do think they will take over the industry and x86 will become obsolete. My pi-top has become my daily driver for productivity now. I use my tower for games and more graphics intensive applications but that is only a handful of times a week now.