Once upon a time you would buy an entire system from the EDA vendor like Mentor Graphics, Zuken or whomever, early on those could be quite bespoke and then even

Once upon a time you would buy an entire system from the EDA vendor like Mentor Graphics, Zuken or whomever, early on those could be quite bespoke and then eventually they used COTS like the HP 9000/300 and Apollo DN10000. And then the generic RISC systems purchased direct from the OEM and eventually the amd64 dominance you describe. I have some IBM POWER2SC (SuperChip) systems with intel asset tags that presumably were used for something special (very pricey machine), maybe MCAD :) PA-RISC was really pushing the performance horizon in the late '90s (like 2-3 years ahead of intel) and had great EDA tools support which was an odd situation because the ISA was effectively frozen in 1997 (thanks Itanium) and just got process and implementation updates that scaled pretty well.