There are elements of Intel being good, and Intel's competitors being useless here, it's not solely technical e.g. It was before my time, but it seems like DEC

There are elements of Intel being good, and Intel's competitors being useless here, it's not solely technical e.g. It was before my time, but it seems like DEC had a good product in the Alpha but were utterly unable to capitalize on it like Intel were able to - similarly with other RISCs. It may also be of note that guesstimates from that era to the early 2000s were usually wildly wrong. Some compiler books from the era say, "Of course, we can count on a [large]% speed increase per-year". https://www.anandtech.com/show/680/6 https://www.anandtech.com/show/680/6 Intel (apparently) thought they would have 10GHz by 2005!!!!