That is how I remember it and I believe it was at the time when Apple made a big marketing drama that their top of the line RISC machine is so fast that it falls under US export control. Due to that, there was a spike in popularity of RISC and Intel marketing being like "We are also RISC!". At least according to my memory.
That was already a misleading campaign at the time and certainly did not age well. When the G4 Mac launched at best 450MHz (delayed 6 months and derated from advertised 500MHz) it was going head-to-head with the 733MHz Pentium III "Coppermine" that was available, cheap, and faster from most points of view. By the time you could actually buy a 500MHz G4, you could also buy a 1000MHz AMD Athlon. To make it seem like the whole PowerPC thing had been a good idea you had to cherry-pick the best Mac and an old PC as a baseline.
The first G4 chips were a couple of years late. It happens sometimes. Intel had a temporary lead in that period. But when it finally hit, it had SIMD that was closer to AVX2 than to SSE.
68040 was faster than original 486, 486dx2 took a lead.
PPC601 was faster than original Pentium. No question. P55C pulled ahead.
PPC G3 immediately leaped past PII. I remember in mid 1998 my employer provided me with a PII 400 and my 266 MHz G3 Powerbook smoked it.
Coppermine P3 was indeed a great advance. And then G4 got going, and by the time chips reached 1.25 and 1.42 GHz the G4 had pulled ahead.
During that G4 (and G5) period many Macs were dual-processor, or even quad for the G5, giving an overall performance advantage even if single-threaded performance was sometimes a little slower. Intel PCs (rather than servers) seldom had dual processor until the Core 2 Duo -- which Apple adopted even before most PC manufacturers.
> To make it seem like the whole PowerPC thing had been a good idea you had to cherry-pick the best Mac and an old PC as a baseline.
No. You just had to pick the right point in time. Sometimes one was faster, sometimes the other.
