They are working on optic chips that use photons. https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2015/08/150813142710.h...

Having X86 and ARM chips means you can run legacy code on them from a long time ago. Which is why they are so popular. But once we go to optical chips for quantum computing there will be no legacy apps from X86 or ARM on them. It would have to write apps from scratch.

Windows 10 is the last version of Windows for a reason. Microsoft is porting their enterprise stuff like SQL Server to Linux. https://blogs.microsoft.com/blog/2016/03/07/announcing-sql-s...

You can tell that Microsoft knows that Windows is getting long in the tooth, and has to support legacy code, and still has old code in it for compatibility reasons. They look at other operating systems like Linux to port their enterprise apps to in order to sell tech support and take a stab at Oracle, MySQL, and PostgreSQL. They know that Linux gets ported to different platforms and so can SQL Server to give them a larger marketshare.

The old X86 and ARM designs are limited due to legacy support of older programs. But they are marketed as backward compatible with older chips.

IBM's Power has been open sourced as OpenPower. http://openpowerfoundation.org/

The Dragonball CPU tries to build on the M68K family of processors.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freescale_DragonBall

So you got a lot of backward compatible CPUs out there, that are limited because they have to support legacy code. The new processors that don't have backward compatibility should run faster with fewer quirks and use new technology not from the 1980s, but programs have to be written from scratch or ported from other platforms.

Windows 10 is the last version of Windows because Microsoft knows that it will eventually have to drop compatibility in order to compete with the new systems and new processors out there that don't have legacy support. The X86-64 chips are a dead-end, and Microsoft has to look to other technologies and a different operating system. Linux is a good choice to support even if Microsoft does not officially have a Linux distro yet. If they open source their enterprise tools like Dotnet or CLR or Roslyn or Visual Studio Code SQL Server to Linux and OSX and other platforms they can sell tech support for it via their paid hotlines. Even making iOS and Android apps for Office and other things.

Microsoft is going to move away from X86-64 and Windows eventually, and focus on The Cloud instead and Azure in hosting VPS operating systems. Then when the new design of processors come out that put X86 and ARM to shame they can port their programs to that new platform.

If you remember the original Micro-Soft business model was to make programs for computers that other companies made and make them for different operating systems. They only got into DOS because IBM made them an offer they couldn't refuse. Windows was basically their attempt at making a Mac GUI for DOS, and working with IBM to bring OS/2 was yet another GUI attempt, but they quit OS/2 and focused on Windows instead. OS/2 was going to be ported to PowerPC, MIPS, Alpha, SH4 and other RISC processors because IBM and Microsoft saw the limitations of the 80X86 processors and wanted something new. But it fell apart. Then Windows NT 4.0 was ported to MIPS, Alpha, etc but abandoned. Windows RT was ported to ARM but flopped. Every attempt to move away from 80X86 processors met with disaster because people wanted to run legacy code.

But soon it will be a new day with new processors and new computers not based on 1980s designs and using Linux or some other FOSS OS and connecting with Cloud computers.