contrast to their desktop offerings

That's because server offerings are real money, which is why Intel isn't fucking those up.

AMD is in the same boat: they make pennies on client and gaming (including gpu), but dumptrucks of cash from selling Epycs.

IMO, the Zen 5(%) and Arrow Lake bad-for-gaming results are because uarch development from Intel and AMD are entirely focused on the customers that pay them: datacenter and enterprise.

Both of those CPU families clearly show that efficiency and a focus on extremely threaded workloads were the priorities, and what do you know, that's enterprise workloads!

end of the x86 era

I think it's less the era of x86 is ended and more the era of the x86 duopoly putting consumer/gaming workloads first has ended because, well, there's just no money there relative to other things they could invest their time and design resources in.

I also expect this to happen with GPUs: AMD has already given up, and Intel is absolutely going to do that as soon as they possibly can without it being a catastrophic self-inflicted wound (since they want an iGPU to use). nVidia has also clearly stopped giving a shit about gaming - gamers get a GPU a year or two after enterprise has cards based on the same chip, and now they charge $2000* for them - and they're often crippled in firmware/software so that they won't compete with the enterprise cards as well as legally not being allowed to use the drivers in a situation like that.

ARM is probably the consumer future, but we'll see who and with what: I desperately hope that nVidia and MediaTek end up competitive so we don't end up in a Qualcomm oops-your-cpu-is-two-years-old-no-more-support-for-you hellscape, but well, nVidia has made ARM SOCs for like, decades, and at no point would I call any of the ones they've ever shipped high performance desktop replacements.

• Yes, I know there's a down-stack option that shows up later, but that's also kinda the point: the ones you can afford will show up for you... eventually. Very much designed to push purchasers into the top end.