As I understand it, this was true for "Big Iron" AMD64 sales, for one thing, AMD had a whole year's head start where they were the only ones selling it, and then Intel played catch up for a long time. For multi-chip machines, not until Intel had their own version of the Hypertransport + local memory controller architecture.
I believe what you're talking about only happened in consumer grade chips, although I know HP for instance found a way to sell AMD based consumer systems, my parents bought one in 2004-5.
Intel's "Core 2" CPUs scrapped the Pentium 4's NetBurst architecture in favor of an evolution of the Pentium M architecture (which was, in turn, an evolution of the Pentium III architecture), and Intel was competitive with AMD on the desktop again. Nehalem brought on-die memory controllers and QPI (Intel's HyperTransport-alike) in late 2008, which made Intel the performance champion on multi-socket servers. AMD's Bulldozer architecture was dead on arrival in 2011, and AMD never recovered from that.
Maybe AMD will pull a rabbit out of their hat with Zen...