It was. The FX-8150 often lost to the phenom II 1100t/1090t/980, even when OCed.
I disagree. During the bulldozer years games were single threaded. Everyone screaming about "MOAR CORES" and intel stagnation have forgotten how much fun we made of AMD's "MOAR CORES" design when their 8 core was being beaten by an i3.
There were 6+ cores available, in intel's HDET design. And every time they were tested, they were slower then the quad core parts, despite having 6 cores and triple/quad channel memory. The demand simply wasnt there. It took until 2018 for games to FINALLY start using 4 cores, which is when 6 cores showed an advantage (4 cores for game+2 for system). the jump from 6 to 8 cores has showed much smaller gains, and quad core i3s can still hold over 60 FPS 1% minimums in every game on the market today. Techspot tested this just recently:
https://www.techspot.com/review/2331-intel-5th-gen-vs-10th-gen/