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There was a lot of discussion about this (it was moved to Tier 2 in FreeBSD 13). Intel shipped 64-bit chips (Core 2) in 2006, so x86-64 has been supported by both of the big x86 vendors for 20 years at this point. Intel sold some 32-bit x86 chips for a while longer (and AMD sold the Geode systems for embedded uses for a bit as well), but a ten-year-old x86-64 chip will run 32-bit workloads faster than pretty much any x86-32 chip and with so much less power consumption that you'll save money over a year by moving to 64-bit. In the embedded space, ARMv7 (and, increasingly, ARMv8) are more power efficient than embedded x86-32 systems (and often much faster as well).
The cost of maintaining the 32-bit x86 port is high and the hardware to test it on is increasingly rare (most committers no longer have any x86-32 hardware and a lot of modern x86-64 systems lack the BIOS compatibility layer in UEFI and have a bunch of other differences so don't test the same code paths as real 32-bit hardware).
There are no plans to remove the 32-bit compat layer for userspace, so you can still run 32-bit x86 userland programs.
@david_chisnall @TomAoki thanks to both of you for sharing these insights. I fully understand this is a logical move, and I was not complaining a single bit there. I just like to have fun with some really old hardware piling up in the attic. Especially this old EeePC that, for no particular reason, I really want to keep alive (yes, that's probably a waste of electricity !).
Cheers :)
I have a couple of Cortex A8 laptops I have a similar feeling about. They shipped with Ubuntu (unusable slow) and Android (not amazing on a thing with no touchscreen). The company that made them donated 10 to the FreeBSD Foundation to use as a reference platform for ARMv7. I've no idea if they were ever made to work, but I kind-of want to use them (their main storage is an SD card, which makes them even slower). I never used them for anything serious and it makes me a bit sad because they're very portable (they have the worst trackpads I've ever used, so maybe terminal-only things would be a good fit).