I only remembered it because recently I pulled an old android tablet out of a junk drawer, installed CPU-Z on it, and scratched my head for a moment about why it said “x86” as the architecture…
I was actually pleasantly surprised with the performance of a $100 x86 HP tablet (running Windows 8.1 of all things) I got back in 2014 or so. It booted and launched apps really fast thanks to the SSD, faster than my regular computer that had an HDD at the time. The Atom processor and single gig of RAM didn’t hamstring it too much for basic web browsing.
The strangest part of that setup was that it used a 32 bit UEFI and a 64 bit operating system, so I couldn’t use regular Linux images. But hey, you could configure the UEFI settings using only the touchscreen!
Naturally the battery life was terrible and it lasted fewer than 12 hours in sleep mode, so it spent little time outside the junk drawer too.
I had a similar experience with a Tesco (U.K. Supermarket) Hudl (their short lived tablet brand) bought in 2015. Not a bad experience and attractive price but awful battery life and got quite hot too!
I then remembered why it was in the junk drawer.