Not too long ago people were talking about the way that Intel had snatched back the performance crown from AMD. The P4 and Netburst was history, Conroe and its successors had done their job. But as we have mentioned before, once Intel gets rolling, they are hard to slow down. They pushed out Nehalem, a native quad-core CPU, which ran a full three channels of RAM and eight threads per cycle. It simply trounced everything out, including older dual-quad core systems out at the time.