Intel was surfing the Moores Law frequency curve. The message they were trying to drive home is that if you stick with us, your existing code will get faster with each release.

They knew they couldn’t keep it up. But when you have a process advantage you want to maintain it. To put it another way, they wouldn’t be sacrificing and advantage to make multi core chips.

This is why I think intel parts are so power hungry, this pathological focus on single core perf.