I remember the K8, Almost every gamer I knew had one. Everybody was rooting for AMD at the time. They were the king. Dual core, 64bit support, almost double the IPC of Intel, lower power than Intel, and more stable. The frequencies weren't as high. My 2.6Ghz Athlon 64 3700+ demolished many Intel CPU's. And then I remember when Core2Duo became a thing like you said. Completely ruined AMD in every benchmark. I believe that Intel had switched their architecture over to what was Pentium Mobile at the time and refactored it. Prescott was optimized for frequency, but the IPC was terrible, as was the heat. We had 4GHZ CPU's back in 2004.