What is funny is that macOS 9 was so snappy on the GUI side but you had to start employing RAM disks and given different names to the same application to run them simultaneously. It could really scoot but occasionally a dialog box might bring everything to a halt until hitting OK or Cancel.
Also MMX was basically the first mainstream use of SIMD so adoption was glacially slow since you had not only limited compiler support but also no libraries and little programmer familiarity with the style. That took a long time for knowledge and tools to improve, especially in the nascent internet era where people couldn’t just look things up on a comprehensive reference site or get help on GitHub.
I'd say there's still limited compiler support for MMX. Because of the strange way you have to use it (it trashes the floating point registers until the next `emms`) compilers won't use it even if it's beneficial, so no autovectorization.
The CMD640 IDE chipset used was utter trash and most of the bottleneck. It wasn't until the G4 series that apple stopped slapping it in everything. A system with the CMD640 only used for cdrom, and a bootable SCSI PCI card performed a lot better.
A lot of the performance complaints came from software that was built for the 68k and ran under emulation. As software built for PPC came out, that complaint went away.
No one saying it competed with high-end machines of the day. But it was quite powerful compared to PCs targeting a home audience.
The other thing to remember, is that computers were only barely powerful enough back then. Powerful models felt powerful precisely because we were desperate for every last CPU cycle we could get.
Barely powerful in early mid-90's. From 1996 an the multimedia PC and a bit later witht the Pentium MMX, the power gap from a 286 based DOS PC from 1991 was something else.
I had a dual-866MHz G4 (MDD) and in most things my Tualatin P3-1200 at the time absolutely beat it. But the G4 was worth using until it literally caught fire just after the warranty ended.
Motorola has a long history of making processors, such as the 68000-series. They powered Macs (and Amiga)
From Wikipedia:
> The PowerPC 7xx is a family of third generation 32-bit PowerPC microprocessors designed and manufactured by IBM and Motorola (spun off as Freescale Semiconductor bought by NXP Semiconductors)
Ditto with G4's and similar cycled Pentium III's.