After two years and three months Intel brings a new architecture to the masses. While Core 2 Duos and Quads do well in the desktop market, Intel struggled with their server platform, especially with more than two CPUs involved. To solve this, Intel had to abandon its previous FSB handling, because it's not efficient with more than two CPUs. Of course, they did not incorporate Hypertransport which was developed by AMD ages ago, they developed their QPI counterpart. In fact, QPI is quite the same as Hypertransport but it avoids joining an alliance controlled by AMD and, of course, nVidia. This would have made things easy for them to develop chipsets and Intel is fond of its chipset income.