Well, it seems like in this case, it's coming from a giant diesel gen ;)

The later Pentium 4 procs were just pushing higher and higher speeds with no regards to the incredible TDP they were now producing - basically it was the epitome of a hot and expensive processor which lost to AMD at that time. The Itanium sinking also doesn't help.

The Core stuff is from a different architecture lineage, and I guess they want to tell people that these processors were something different from the hot P4s.

But you're right, the Core naming is retarded - Core and Core 2, are different families, the solo, duo and quad, are the number of cores...people get confused as to what the '2' means - "is it 2 cores?" etc.

The problem is, "best" is subjective. One's person's "best" is not the same as another. When comparing against the original, we have a baseline to compare against.

And example of this would be that different codecs preserve certain frequencies differently. Different people are more sensitive to changes in different frequencies. If it just happens that a codec does preserve a those particular frequencies that you are sensitive to, then of course you will feel that that codec is bad.

Of course, I'm oversimplifing things. Factors like the music, speakers/headphones, etc, all play a part in how you preceive quality of the codec.

So, basically, the idea is, when doing testing which will be relevant to others, we need to test against the original. But if you're testing to see what codec is best for your own personal use, yes, you can use the codec that sounds "best" to you.