I remember running SQL Server on a Digital Alphaserver 1000a back in the 90's. That machine was a physical beast though I'm not sure about the actual processing speed. The most interesting thing about the whole affair was the split case with drives on one side and a huge ducted fan on the other. That was the single most coolest thing in the room. :)
They'd laugh at you since at that time ARM was something that ran in either small-format low power low-clock devices (like a Newton) or in fringe machines like the Acorn Archimedes.
Because it wasn't Intel, it was PowerPC, and Intel always manages to pull a rabbit out of the hat in terms of performance and price.
Also if I recall I don't think Windows NT for PowerPC ever truly saw the light of day. And this was while Windows 95/98 was still dominant and before Windows 2000/XP, so there wasn't really consumer software for it. So no real operating systems.
PowerPC ended up being a dead end which only Apple pursued. Though I guess there were variants that ended up in gaming consoles for a while.
At a job I had (IBM subsidiary) in 1997 they had a pile of early-CHRP boxes hanging around. For kicks I got Linux running on them, just out of curiosity. They were basically juts PCs (PCI bus, etc.) that ran with a PowerPC CPU. Which is effectively what Macs were for years, too.
