content: I'm not sure which one is the lawnmower engine in your analogy. The Intel x86 CPU is a ridiculous design in this day and age compared with the purity of the ARM. There was a time when ARM first appeared where it ran serious rings around anything Intel had and it is just because they've put so much effort into adding transistors that they've been able to lift the thing out of the gutter while the ARM moved off the desktop RISC machines and into niche use eventually finding its way into the phones we all have. ARM is a very powerful and scalable architecture and it has still got plenty of scope to improve performance as we keep seeing. The x86 only exists today because of Windows.  Lose the dependency on Windows and plenty of other architectures make a whole heap more sense. I loved the DEC Alpha back in the day and it was incredibly fast and easy to program. Assembly on that was like a high level language compared with the mess that is the x86 ISA. Software is still masking a lot of the crap that we have to put up with on Intel chips but moving away from Windows gets us into a world where we can strip off all that legacy and advance performance again.