>I think the big change will be a move to RISC architecture (which ARM has).
>Power and temperature are the drivers. Per watt and per therm, RISC has
>a large advantage. 10 years (Craig's estimate) seems right to me.

That was a central premise of the movie Hackers back in the mid-90s, that RISC would dominate over CISC. It never panned out, though it's arguable that RISC did win out already because even x86's CISC breaks everything down to micro-ops, which are more or less RISC-like.

Perhaps now that we're all moving toward mobile, and the massive advantages to massively parallel ARM-based servers are proving themselves in the battle fields ... perhaps it will. ARM-64 will be the true game changer though ... assuming it's ever released, and it delivers the commensurate increase in performance for little additional power consumption over ARM-32, as what we saw moving from IA-32 to AMD64. :-)