The FX-60 from 2006 I think was the last AMD CPU that held this crown. 2.6Ghz and it beat Intel's top chip at 3.5Ghz. The only thing on the market with higher single threaded performance was their own FX-57 which was single core with a slightly higher clock speed.

https://www.anandtech.com/show/1920

I still have my old FX-60 in an antistatic clamshell. I just could never bring myself to get rid of it, I loved that processor so much. That and XPx64 held me for a very long time.

That's when Intel "let's go faster" made them meet the 4Ghz barrier head on for the first time. More than a decade later and we're still pretty much there.

One has to wonder how things would have gone if they didn't have the Core-M architecture on the side back then.

Intel knew that the Netburst Architecture was power hungry so it had established an Israeli team to develop a mobile architecture in tandem. I believe they started with Tualatin or another late PIII design and optimized the hell out of the microcode. I believe that became Banias and they continued to bring in aspects of Netburst to produce the precursors to the Core line.

Yeah that's why they invented the nomenclature such as "AMD Athlon 3200+". It was equivalent to a 3.2Ghz pentium in performance.

netburst was rapidly killed, nobody hid that it was a failure

Its death wasn't rapid.

RDRAM, though, that was rapid. But that was only a fraction of Netburst's problems.

Netburst lasted for 6ish years before it was not intel's premier product, and then another 2-3 afterwards in various forms.

Really.. my memory is bad then. I thought it was 5 years including a 2 years lingering period.