[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.