The point of all this isn’t to point fingers or level blame on Intel or AMD for “deceiving” buyers (especially at this juncture), its to shed light on how a simple statistic can become a marketing force capable of justifying vast premiums for products that offer only minimally more performance than their lower-priced cousins. It’s a high-tech version of the Emperor’s New Clothes, a game of one-upmanship where neither side is willing to admit how far from reality the game has gotten. Why did Intel focus on memory bandwidth? Because it was a big number they could tout. Why did AMD focus on dual-channel configurations? Because Intel had dual-channel configurations. And everyone (even the people for whom it couldn’t possibly matter) bought into it, because we learned somewhere along the way that two is better than one.