I don't think forever, but I do wonder how long it's going to take before the industry finally gets it through their heads that you can't keep updating a 32-year-old architecture by extending the register width and lumping in coprocessor functionality indefinitely.
That's also what Intel and HP thought when they developed their Itanium 64 bit processors. Then came AMD with their 64 bit extensions to the year-old 32 bit architecture. And the rest is history...
greets,
Staf.
