It's interesting to see this sentiment surface again, as x86 was far behind other architectures for such a long time and this argument was a basic ingredient of

It's interesting to see this sentiment surface again, as x86 was far behind other architectures for such a long time and this argument was a basic ingredient of the platform debates in years past. The answer of course is software compatiblity, OSes, CPU platforms, HW markets etc are not interchangeable, and x86 was and is the only practically open platform with big enough market that there's working competition between hw/system vendors, os vendors, sw vendors, etc. Then eventually in the late 90s, x86 matched and later overtook the competitors, helped by the huge volumes leaving process investments of competitors too far behind. (Everyone had0 their own private fabs then, and process generations got expoenntially more expensive). After the RISC camp struggled head to head with x86 for a few years the race was over in 5-ish years. Probably the 21164 and 21264 were the last chips to hands down beat x86 by a large margin. They had a Rosetta style translator back then and most (?) x86 Windows apps ran faster on the Alpha/WinNT platform than on fastest native x86 chip for a time.