Yea, I am likely optimistic.
We went through binary translation/emulation quite a few times.
-Alpha Windows NT
-Transmeta
-Itanium, both the hardware one and IA32EL
-Intel mobile Android
-Windows on ARM
-Many Apple transitions
Since its trying to be something its not, problems are bound to happen. Nothing fundamentally changes. I think you'll see 70% at least for press release numbers.
For someone trying to dispense advice to those that are set on going ~macbook-iMac this year, in the very near future, what does this performance hit mean for first gen hardware, about 5 years out? Does the translation get better over time--basically, is it a software improvement that will overcome this translation over time, or will the first gen Ax whatever processors be hard-fixed in some way for the years to come, in terms of a comparable performance hit?
I'm trying to consider the best course of action between picking up a last gen x86 Apple, first Gen ARM, or maybe 2nd gen ARM-based system. ...it sounds like the more common software will be OK, but I'm thinking about how niche uses--open source software like imageJ and various bioinformatics tools (usually PERL or python-based, sometimes c++) are effected by these things. Now, the latter type of tools tend to perform very well in multi-threaded environments, and I'm not sure if that means it will just always be better on x86 or ARM is perfectly fine?