The Core Architecture in the mid 2000's was such an incredible shot back to the top. I remember seeing the benchmarks absolutely dominate AMD on every level, power, performance, TDP, Cost, etc. etc. This is almost immediately after Athlon 64 and the Athlon 64X2 started to gain market share, spanking Intel's Pentium 4 at the time. IIRC Intel ended up dropping the Prescott architecture, moving to the Pentium M architecture for development of the Core CPU's. Moving away from chasing max frequencies, and instead looking at IPC. Then Nehalem Dropped, (The first Core i CPU's) making the gap even larger. Q6600, Quad Core, Low power, decent cost. That was the CPU to have at the time. I miss the days reading about all of this.