I don't think that x86 beat Alpha. Alpha was more expensive because of a bunch of reason, but just in terms of how much performance they got out of the same amount of transistors, Alpha was better.

But I think generally speaking you are right, the size of the teams that all the RISC people had compared to the amount of resources Intel had was not really comparable.

> The transition from bipolar to CMOS was also difficult because it did mean a regression in performance

DEC already had the VAXCluster by 1983 and they were working on a bunch of implementations at the same time. They did a lower performance VAX already when the did a AMD 29000 bit-slice implementation in 1982. So they did know the value lower performance. By 1985 they had matched the 780 in a single chip. Basically by 1988 the CMOS version was already faster then anything else.

The transition was really just difficult because some people (who happen to be CEO) didn't want to see the reality.

The 730 used the AMD 2900 (not 29000) chipset.