I would be curious to read what people at DEC/Compaq/HP thought at the time about this because presumably people on the Alpha team would have thought of this idea. IIRC the Alpha could run x86 (with automatic translation) faster than the latest Intel chips[1] but then Intel got sufficiently good at the whole out-of-order thing (and I guess at the process of making chips in general) that they took the lead. Maybe there are good reasons that the people working on the Alpha thought they couldn’t win?

I’m particularly interested in the Alpha because it seems like the thing was designed with many of today’s CPU performance challenges in mind. E.g. simple stuff like 64-bit but also things like caches and multiprocessing (cf the very weak concurrent memory model). See also [2]

[1] eg see this from ’97 claiming that 0.5GHz Alpha could run x86 at comparable speed to a 2GHz PII https://www.usenix.org/legacy/publications/library/proceedin... but I’ve also seen claims that the Pentium Pro of ’95 would have been faster than this

[2] https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/151220.151226 and I think the same here: https://www.hpl.hp.com/hpjournal/dtj/vol4num4/vol4num4art1.p...