There
should not be a reason to use an Intel CPU, but there are so many issues.
I use an Intel instead of a AMD because of AMD's unwillingness to acknowledge
a bug in Ryzen that affects mostly Unix/Linux users, and because of lack of good mATX and mITX motherboards for the AM4 socket. (That was the case when it was time to buy, anyway. AMD looks better now)
I use x86-64 because of hardware and software support. Not just Linux distributions but I would also like to play some games for which almost all require x86 and many require Windows (which I would only run virtualised, of course).
I would have liked to build a modern MIPS or SPARC system into a vintage SGI or Sun case (respectively) that I have, just for the principle, but there are also no modern high-performance MIPS or SPARC systems with good motherboards, etc. so it wouldn't be more useful than
at best a Raspberry Pi but at many times the cost.
A 64-bit ARM-based PC would be cool. It is the most capable, modern CPU architecture out there today ... but I want a proper PC running a free Unix variant, not a locked-in throttled iPad or Android device that runs on battery, with deficient passive cooling, with planned obsolescence and no ports.
In the long-term I would like to use
The Mill but it is still years from silicon. Maybe a prototype in FPGA this year though. It should run faster and cooler than any x86-64 or AArch64 and it is impervious to Meltdown, Spectre and return-oriented programming.
I follow this closely and if I had the money, I would invest in it.
I (and many others) have long had a dream of CPU instruction architecture begin irrelevant, that operating systems would instead use a architecture-neutral binary format that would be compiled to native code first when a program is installed. The goal would be that programs could be developed and tested on one architecture and then be deployed on
any CPU out there with no compatibility issues.
I have revisited the problem now and then over the years. Fifteen years ago, GCC was unfortunately the best framework to start with and it was a tangled mess... Now, there is LLVM (which is not a VM), but while it could be useful, it is far from a solution. The problem of making software safe, secure and
bug-compatible over CPU architectures is
Hard. The more you dwell into the problem, the more and more esoteric technical issues you will find, and the more you will add to your TODO-list of software in the tool-chain needed to support this.