Most of Intel's volume is probably shipped to customers who either don't care or buy a lot of CPUs in one go, so the advantage of this probably isn't quite as a

Most of Intel's volume is probably shipped to customers who either don't care or buy a lot of CPUs in one go, so the advantage of this probably isn't quite as apparent as you'd imagine. What can definitely play a role is that (I don't think it's as much of a problem these days, but it definitely has been in the past) is the standard "benchmark" suites that chipmakers can beat each other over the head with e.g. I think it was Itanium that had a bunch of integer functional units mainly for the purpose of getting better SPEC numbers rather than working on the things that actually make programs fast (MEMORY) - I was maybe 1 or 2 when this chip came out, so this is nth-hand gossip, however.