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Why Linux pioneer Linus Torvalds prefers x86 chips over ARM processors

Torvalds has an affinity for x86 because of the infrastructure and ecosystem

People are too fixated with the instruction set and the CPU core, Torvalds said, but it ultimately is the ecosystem around the architecture that matters more.

“What matters is all the infrastructure around the instruction set, and x86 has all that infrastructure... at a lot of different levels,” Torvalds said. “It’s opening a way that no other architecture is.”

A lot of application development happens on PCs with x86 chips from Intel or AMD. Compatibility matters for x86 chips and PCs, which have a unified model around hardware, development, and other infrastructure.

http://www.pcworld.com/article/3129300/linux/why-linux-pioneer-linus-torvalds-prefers-x86-over-arm.html