[barrkel]

I don't think that's a good summary of Intel's past approach. The Pentium 4 to Core and Core 2 by way of Pentium M for example - Intel abandoned raw clock counts (what process bought them before) and started targeting IPC, which requires more engineering than pure process improvement.

Yes, there are still gains from getting more transistors for your buck, but you still have to put those transistors to work, and Intel hasn't been a slouch here. The process improvements didn't give them their advantage over AMD.

[Retric]

A large part of why Core/Core 2 worked was very large caches which take extreme transistor counts, but not much else. If they had been forced to cut them in half their performance would have been significantly worse.

P4 Willamette was 42M transisters December 2000, i7 2600k from January 2011 (almost exactly 10 years) is arguably the peak of their Core dominance as progress dropped to a standstill over the last 7 years had 8 MiB of cache. That's 4 cores for 1.16 billion transistors or 290 Million each.

After 1Ghz it's really just a latency game, faster ram does not do much so CPU's without massive caches just starve. Which is why the P4 eventually moved to 130 Million transistors and a relatively large cache.