If it cannot beat them at 640x480, it cannot beat them anywhere, just tie. Reality of CPU limitations
I'm not quite sure it works like that. My understanding (especially from Kyle's statements at the event yesterday) is that there are more and more games supporting 8 threads. I just can't see a low resolution stressing the CPU enough to take advantage of more cores. You're correct though in that it IS an important metric for IPC. And if clocks are truly separated by 1+ghz, there will be a heavy favor to Intel's chips (and rightly so!).