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I guess that they have to at least compete with themselves if they want to sell something and for that they probably need to soundly beat their previous CPUs. Bear in mind how long it's been since first Quad cores were released, and those are enough for most people. Even Core i7 is been here long enough. Enthusiasts will upgrade for a little improvement but the mayority of people will not upgrade unless there's a significant advancement*, and the market is pretty much saturated. Intel has already seen that the market is slowing down, not all quarters have been as good as they thought despite not having a real competitor, so they need to keep moving or simply see their market shrink and eventually die of starvation (Intel is big company that needs high revenues in order to survive).
* I know many people that only do office work, that still use single cores like P4, Athlon XP and heck I still have a 486 that works (if only was useful). Obviously those are not usable by todays standards, or not desirable (P4/Athlon XP), but a quad core CPU will always be enough for "home use" unless tasks like web surfing and office are deliberately made a lot harder to run, wich would stink even to illitertes IMO. So people would hold on to those for as long as the hardware lived or until there's a new CPU that brings a massive performance advantage for very little price. Intel can't just afford to sell you 1 CPU every 10 years, they need you tu buy their CPUs every 3-4 years minimum.
Excellent points.