That's exactly when motorola dropped the ball (as the article mentions) - a year before they were still more or less head to head, but once amd & intel started reaching for the 1 ghz barrier they left motorola & ibm behind.

Somehow the various RISC vendors managed to remain competitive for a bit longer at the top end[0] - maybe it was easier to compete at the high workstation/server/supercomputer end than at consumer hardware?

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supercomputer#/media/File:Proc... - x86 only started dominating well into the 2000s.