The moral of this story is that a healthy dose of competition does lead to innovation

A Pentium 4 Cedar Mill held the WR overclock of 8.2 GHz for a very long time

They make decent space heaters though.

These early days of processors I was constantly upgrading between the companies. A Pentium to K6 to a PIII celeron to a Duron and then an Athlon XP and then a Pentium HT before finally the stable era arrived with the Core 2 duo and all the subsequent CPUs largely being small incremental upgrades at more or less the same clockspeed peak and lots of the performance coming from more cores. There was a lot of back and forth in price/performance and absolute performance as various innovations and pipline length increases and clockspeed were release. Things changed drastically in the 8 years we went from 100Mhz Pentiums through to the Core 2 Duos where both companies lead and trailed and you needed to upgrade your machine most years to keep up with modern games.

The commercials were baller, though