Perhaps another factor is the software's difficulty to successfully utilize more than a couple of cores? I imagine Intel thinking "We're a couple of process ste

Perhaps another factor is the software's difficulty to successfully utilize more than a couple of cores? I imagine Intel thinking "We're a couple of process steps ahead of everyone else, we should take advantage of that. But adding more cores in the same package has reached dimishing returns due to pin count and main memory bandwidth. Most applications won't utilize that 13th hyperthread anyway. So let's improve the memory subsystem from within the package."