I'm not sure about MIPS, but over the years there were times when Alpha, Sparc, and PowerPC were each ahead of x86 in performance. Intel outpaced them by using

I'm not sure about MIPS, but over the years there were times when Alpha, Sparc, and PowerPC were each ahead of x86 in performance. Intel outpaced them by using their huge volume sales to invest in fabrication improvement at a scale none of them could hope to match, going to ever more complicated internal architectures, and a dash of perfectly legal but slightly expensive tricks (like hiring away key designers). Intel stumbled in fabrication and complicated architecture is having a bit of a growing pain. The CPU market doesn't make revenue like it used it – very few desktop users feel the need to upgrade every two years and for many applications pretty much any CPU is fast enough. Growth in the cloud market could be good, but any thing that threatens their market share of the cloud is threat to Intel.