It isn't about the cost of the cpu. Yes Intel eventually won on the market scale. But the real problem was, that you couldn't get a Sparc or PowerPc or whatever on a standard PC motherboard for a reasonable price. From the middle to end of the 90ies, lots of the Linux community would gladly have bought a non-x86 CPU/motherboard combo. The RISC-processors of that time still had an edge over Intel. Even later, with the G5 processor, they could have been competetive, if there had been a CPU/motherboard combo available.