It depends. Before peecee memory architectures got gud in the early oughts, the Octanes were sufficiently better for big finite element codes than Intel based

It depends. Before peecee memory architectures got gud in the early oughts, the Octanes were sufficiently better for big finite element codes than Intel based machines that you'd still see them used for that. But it didn't last, and you're right that the writing was on the wall already in the mid nineties. I got a Pentium 90 running Slackware running some less demanding scientific code faster than a pretty loaded Indigo2 in that era.