I’m not sure about that. If for example the EU says “for the environment, you may not use chips that use X watts/Ghz” or something, x86 might be out of the game pretty quickly. Also, becoming market leader doesn’t mean old hardware, it’s the new hardware. I bet by 2030, the majority of chipsets sold will be either ARM or RISC-V. AMD did make an ARM rival with the 7840U, but with their entry in to ARM in 2025, it’s not preposterous to believe the ARM ecosystem will pick up steam.

Also, recompiling opensource stuff for ARM is probably not going to be a huge issue. clang and gcc already support ARM as a compilation target, and unless there’s x86 specific code in python or ruby interpreters, UI frameworks like Qt and GTK, they should be able to be compiled without much issue. If proprietary code can’t keep up or won’t keep up, the most likely outcome will be x86 emulators or the dumping of money into QEMU or stuff like Rosetta for windows.

Anyway, I’m talking out of my ass here as I don’t write C/C++ and don’t have to deal with cross-compilation, nor do I have any experience in hardware. It’s all just a feeling.