Mlid wasn't born when that news came out. Try not to live up to your username here. Gillespie of Intel wrote a white paper at the time Intel was considering this which used examples of Amdahls law and Gustafson's trend but attempted to white wash it by saying the theory doesn't necessarily apply to real world performance. At the time intel saw a 1.9-2x speedup in performance with 2 cores versus 1, and a near 3.8x performance gap with 4 cores versus 2. The running theory at Intel at the time was they could bend the laws by modern reality with more cores while offering more frequency for a near-linear performance improvement. Except we all know you run into more problems.
Around the same time a European paper which Intel's French engineer, forget his name, commented on believing they could achieve it possibly in the near future on a better lithography process that closed the gaps alongside more careful design. I'm sure intel did try at some point in their labs but it didn't obviously pan out. It wouldn't be until years later we got better core designs, more cores, and better i/o handling in the processor. Still no linear performance, but damn good.