[spijdar]

I think "RISC" was, for a stretch of time, "superior", but it was always in very expensive and very niche workstations and servers.

x86 was itself a kind of underdog in that space, losing out in sheer performance and bandwidth to the high-end RISC market, but making up for it by, you know, being cheap enough that "regular people" could go and buy a family computer with an x86 processor.

Intel managed to slowly improve the various deficiencies over time, and produced a processor not only affordable, but also superior to the incumbent RISC chips in all but niche areas.

I think more than the ISA, Apple's M1 manages to be so good at its job for similar reasons to the old RISC chips -- it's built from the ground-up with a pretty specific target application, rather unlike x86, which has to be all things to all people, with legacy support and scaling from laptops to quad socket 3U servers.