It actually was more of a hope back then
You see back then standard CPUs were easily fast enough to do all the "complicated" things where you have lots of branching and parsing and stuff. Speed was mostly needed at "simple" things like 3D graphics or video. Those things are fairly deterministic and probably could be done very quickly with VLIW architectures.
What Intel underestimated was that there's lots of legacy code out there which will never be touched and stay exactly the same binary, so that x86 emulation is way more important than they thought. Then that "complicated" code got slower and slower. Today we are at a point where a modern, but only mid-range machine actually barely can keep up with a decent typist, because the editor was implemented via a browser. That's just madness and what people underestimated back then.