One thing that might help x86 to survive is if more chip area on future processors is used for special-purpose accelerators, such as neural engines, rather than CPU cores. The smaller the fraction of transistors used for CPU cores, the less differences between x86 and ARM will matter. That theory didn’t work for Intel when they tried to make cell phone chips but maybe it will work for future processors with special-purpose accelerators. Intel’s future Meteor Lake CPU is rumored to contain a neural engine.

Intel or AMD could make 3 versions of a processor with 25%, 50% and 75% of chip area used for CPU cores and 75%, 50% and 25% used for neural engines. This could be implemented by having two tile types and varying the fraction of each tile type on a module. The neural engine and the software stack that supports it would need to be as good as Nvidia’s.