It’s got remarkable staying power, the PC. By rights it should have gone the way of the Betamax years ago, somewhere between the PS2’s stratospheric popularity and ARM-powered smartphones invading the gaming space with an army of disgruntled avians, clashing clans and brain-dissolvingly stupid ads. But it hasn’t.
And until quite recently, it’s been obvious why the traditional arrangement of discrete componentry running on the same old architecture has endured. Windows is where gaming happens on PCs, and Windows is an x86 or x64-based OS. That means you need a CPU with very specific architecture extensions—which Intel and AMD hold exclusive rights to—in
