I am not sure how good of a benchmark geekbench is, but ever since AMD stopped pushing Intel, they have been a little complacent. When AMD introduced Athlon 64

I am not sure how good of a benchmark geekbench is, but ever since AMD stopped pushing Intel, they have been a little complacent. When AMD introduced Athlon 64 it really forced Intel to step its game up. The core 2 duo was pretty impressive. AMD hasn't had a competitive product in years and Intel has just been providing some incremental improvements here and there. With shrinking transistor sizes they can shorten their pipeline maybe add a few more front end decoders, add even more cache. If you have a shorter pipeline the branch misses aren't as bad. There is a lot of stuff they could do which they probably aren't since they haven't had a real incentive to do so.