It'll hit the embedded world pretty hard.

Today you can buy a brand new soekris box that only runs i586. Brand
new off the shelf, today. My 6 or 7 year old one is running right now
as an asterisk server at home. Draws about 5 watts. Its not exactly
the newest piece of hardware they sell but its still available as an
embedded / embeddable device. It draws about twice the power of a
rasp-pi, a good solid one amp at 12 volts.

Its kinda sad because two years ago there were threads on the soekris
boards about having to move from Ubuntu to Debian when i586 was
dropped by Ubuntu and now they'll have to move AGAIN just two years
later to ... something. Its not like I'm going to throw out a working
PBX because of some OS foolishness. I'll move mine to netbsd or
whatever else runs on a i586.

http://comments.gmane.org/gmane.comp.hardware.soekris.technical/18358

The root cause of the problem is the Debian/Ubuntu ecosystem is moving
away from the "universal OS" mantra and toward being a GNOME
bootloader for tablets and everything else can just go away. Thats
the war... abandonment of entire industry sectors or weird init
decisions are merely a small battle, the war is the move toward
turning the OS into a GNOME bootloader for tablets.

Note that soekris used to sell embedded low power 486 boards until
semi-recently. I actually used one as a firewall until I needed more
horsepower for some tasks. Excellent hardware BTW.