Great, so, they can get close to the Core 2 Quad Q9400, with the top end of their CPUs, that means they are about one generation and half behind, the gap is still increasing ...
(Q9400 is in the middle of the Core 2 Quad selection)
I would not call that a success if I was the Green performance guy.
The best way to help them is to stay honnest about it, just my 2 cents. (Remember the Pentium 4 time frame, it takes to understand your problem to fix it, I learned this)