I work with (consumer) internet gateways and the like.
In Broadcom's SoCs the main chip is ARM. They have been moving away from MIPS for a number of years.
I'm less familiar with other vendors but I briefly worked with a Qualcomm-based device a few years ago and that was also ARM.
There might be some dedicated cores in those SoCs or devices for e.g. accelerators or Wi-Fi handling. I've seen ARC there but I have the feeling these are also moving to ARM.
I think that was only true a few years ago. Everything now, from router, NAS to other appliance are moving towards ARM.
MIPS and PPC are still being used only because of cost ( vendors selling other chips ). The replacement cycles is very very slow, but the trend is pretty clear.
Could be, but I've been shocked by some of the products I've seen that have a full blown ARM in them these days. My friend bought a mouse with a full 32 ARM MCU in it.
I think the only piece of software I use that’s tied to x86 is the discord native client (which is pretty dumb since it’s an electron app.) This is something I’m (hopefully) not using anymore after quarantine.
Personally I have plenty of arm machines. Part of the reason I switched from fvwm to cwm was because I couldn’t build fvwm on one machine and move it to the other.
In college they asked for x86 windows binaries for lots of the assignments and I always cross compiled from an arm machine (because that’s where I had the toolchain set up and didn’t feel like duplicating it on my x86 laptop.) If you feel stuck on x86 use more FOSS.
