I recall asking the question then "why can't we stack cores on top of each other" and being told by very senior engineers how stupid that idea was...
Working at Intel was actually the golden age of my gaming experience; I worked in the game development lab and played video games to test SIMD extensions 18 hours a day.
I recall going out to a balcony in SC5 and having a cigarette, there was some person from finance there, and after chatting with him for a bit I asked why he was working so late; he was trying to figure out how to recode the finance system to add additional spaces to the finance DB to allow for the many billions they had in the bank. Apparently the fields were initially set too short to handle the numbers as large as they were dealing with...
Andy was an incredible person.