Summing it all up: AMD Athlon X2 4800+ has swept in Pentium XE 840 essentially because AMD was ready to design two cores on a single die. Alas, Intel turned out not ready for this concept de facto: the current mainstream core based on NetBurst architecture (another reincarnation of basic Prescott) consumes too much power and dissipates too much heat. That would do for a regular CPU (top Pentium 4 processors work all right!), but that's too much for a dual core processor with the same clock as top single core CPUs. That's actually the reason of Pentium eXtreme Edition 840 running at a rather low clock (compared to top Pentium 4 processors). It's the low clock of the Intel dual core processor that left it no chances to victory: if it had been 3.8 GHz instead of 3.2 GHz, everything could have been different.