Well Intel wasn’t exactly sitting idle during the Athlon 64 era. It was just unfortunate that none of their plans worked out. NetBurst was a bust. IA-64 floppe

Well Intel wasn’t exactly sitting idle during the Athlon 64 era. It was just unfortunate that none of their plans worked out. NetBurst was a bust. IA-64 flopped too. Both were attempts to progress from the P6 architecture - which they felt had reached its limits. In the end, the market spoke, they want the P6. No one was willing to rewrite software (or even recompile). So back to the P6 in the form of the Pentium M followed by the Core /Core dual series and finally the i3/5/7/9 that we use today - which you would notice hasn’t improved much per core; as mentioned the P6 style design is pretty much tapped out and all they can do is “squeeze blood from stone” for a few percentage improvements here and there. AMD recently caught up but frankly, they aren’t doing much better. Performance per core is just on par with Intel. Their main selling point is that they made it cheaper by splitting the L3 cache in 2 - the Ryzen is basically 2 quad-cores glued together for better yields.