Remember about two years ago, when absolutely everyone wanted to either upgrade their existing PC or buy a new one? Yeah, that doesn't appear to be the case anymore, according to the latest market report from Mercury Research. The report states that x86 chip shipments have dropped by the largest percentage year-over-year since the report began way back in 1994. Analyst Dean McCarron says it's probably the largest decline since the precipitous downturn of 1984.

The Mercury Research CPU market share results are in for the fourth quarter of 2021, showing that AMD now comprises 25.6% of the overall x86 market, its highest share ever, partially on the strength of its increasing gaming console shipments.

Now that Microsoft's Windows on ARM emulation layer can also run 64-bit x86 code, inevitably there will be questions as to how it compares with the Apple M1.

There are so many ironies in the hardware business that it is amazing that we aren't covered in rust. One irony is that after decades of socket compression in the datacenter, the time of the single socket server may have returned. And if it does, it will be largely AMD's doing with the Epyc line of X86 chips, which were created to give no-holds-barred performance sufficient to knock out a slew of two socket Xeon machinery in the datacenter.

Thanks to a licensing deal with AMD and a complex joint-venture arrangement, the Chinese chip producer Chengdu Haiguang IC Design (Hygon) is now producing x86-based server processors that are largely indistinguishable from AMD's EPYC processors - so close in design that Linux kernel developers had to do little in the way of patching to support the new processor family, called "Dhyana." The server chips are being manufactured for domestic use only - part of an effort to break China's dependence on foreign technology companies.

AMD has had a fantastic past year. Its desktop-grade Ryzen microprocessors were successful in grabbing some x86 PC market share from Intel, which, in turn, nudged AMD back into profitability. And this might just be the start of the smaller chip-maker's newfound sales momentum. Advanced Micro Devices is readying up to launch a Ryzen Refresh line-up in the first quarter of 2018 on a slightly improved 12nm node.

Microsoft described Scorpio, the SoC inside its Xbox X One. Scorpio packs 7 billion transistors with 6 TFlops graphics performance in a 359-square millimeter chip made in a 16FF+ TSMC process. The chip, designed in partnership with AMD, also packs eight x86 cores running at 2.3 GHz and sharing 4 Mbytes L2 cache.

At the end of what looked like a blog post simply celebrating Intel's 40-year anniversary of the launch of the first x86 processor, the Intel 8086, is a potential warning from the chip maker for those looking to emulate x86 on various processors.

Recently Qualcomm claimed that it'll be the only ARM partner that will support x86 apps on its platform. Now, ARM executives clarify that not only Qualcomm, but any other manufacturer out there will be able to run x86 apps on its platform - whether its Samsung, Apple, Huawei or others.

Any split of AMD would result in two smaller companies, heavily interdependent, taking on larger, entrenched, and determined competitors.

In the data center, where Intel has handily trounced AMD in sales of server microprocessors, there is still a need for x86-compatible chips, of which AMD holds the only cards outside Intel. That could make AMD a target in the data center for Xilinx or for Chinese state-owned investment vehicles.

Avnet Technology Solutions has landed the contract to supply Lenovo's recently acquired x86 server products and related offerings across the UK and Europe.

The next generation of Google Glass may have new guts, according to The Wall Street Journal (subscription required), which expects a deal between Google and Intel.

Hewlett Packard and Japan's NEC will expand their existing partnership to develop high-end x86-based servers for cloud and Web applications.

RBC Capital Markets speculates that Intel could build ARM-based chips for future iPhones and, in return, Apple could use x86 processors in next-generation iPads.

IT bellwhether IBM missed Wall Street's revenue projections for Q1 by a smidgen but beat expectations for bottom line growth.

Intel's x86 architecture reigns supreme on PCs and millions of servers. Anywhere else, the ARM processors have won

By the end of 2011, ARM will be a "small but significant" PC processor architecture, said a Gartner analyst.

A new super central processing unit (CPU), jointly developed by Japan's big chipmakers and funded by the Tokyo government, is coming up to challenge Intel.