History, like time, puts everyone in their place. There is nothing to do, just sit and wait with a bowl of popcorn and enjoy the show quietly from the sofa. But from mistakes you learn and both Intel and AMD have done it well on their processors, but for this, they have had to analyze their most disastrous CPUs, which we will review by looking back through a list of their worst CPUs in history.
The worst CPUs in the history of AMD and Intel
Pentium 4 (Prescott)
Fame clouded Intel and AMD passed them on the left and raised the stickers at the headquarters of the blues, something similar to what is happening again today, although at that time it was much greater. With a 40-stage pipeline and a node built at 90nm, Intel tried to compete against its rival with a rather poor architecture in performance per cycle and with a prediction engine that was a disaster, since it slowed down the data throughout the pipeline.
His node was really deficient in terms of energy leaks, it was not for nothing that he ended up colloquially called PressHOT , which added to the high frequencies that the company needed made these processors a more than bad option than even the aggressive marketing of that time could cover.
Intel Pentium 4 (Smithfield)
If the Prescotts were a problem for the brand, the need to get a dual-core option out in time could only further cloud the fact that the node and architecture were a mess.
Intel included two die Prescott on a single PCB that communicated by FSB , which meant increasing its value to 800 MHz and lowering the frequencies to 3.2 GHz for the Extreme Edition version.
Logically they were good “stoves” that the marketing had to cover again until the arrival of the freshest Cedar Mill at 65 nm.
Intel Itanium
Big changes are not generally liked in the industry and Intel Itanium intended just this. With increased complexity in its hardware, the compiler became a prime part of architecture performance by allowing instructions to run in parallel.
As it always happens, hardware is ahead of software, in this case by far, and programmers were unable to adapt to this new wave of processors that was predicted, they would replace the entire X86.
Intel stopped supporting and building its latest processors last year, so it did its best for 18 years to change the concept of processor in areas outside of business use.
AMD Bulldozer
The Bulldozer story has brought a queue to this day, where a lawsuit was settled last year and AMD was ordered to pay royalties to certain users for misleading advertising. AMD’s attempt with their cores was good, but their execution was horrible.
They attempted to drive smaller dies with higher clocks that shared resources across their integer units, which reduced physical space by including fewer transistors than adding separate INT Cores per module .
It was a total fiasco that almost killed AMD and on the other hand led to a complete change of architecture to finally launch Zen. You just have to remember the FX-8170 at 4.5 GHz to think that the southern heat is not such if it We compare this or other processors in the range, not to mention the FX-9590 Filedriver with 220 watts of TDP, perfect for the Nordic countries.
Perhaps AMD’s biggest mistake was persisting in launching new models with slight improvements knowing that it would banish them for many years seeing what Intel was launching. As we say, it was the biggest mistake in its history and it almost cost it the disappearance of the world panorama.
AMD E-Series APUs
In an absurd attempt to compete with Intel and its ATOMs (separate chapter for the latter) AMD launched APUs based on the E series (E2-9000 for example) where, since they could not compete in CPUs, they did the same with the iGPU, where they clearly outclassed their rival.
The problem is that the design of the iGPU compromised the CPU too much and they turned out to be APUs that did not meet even the minimum required to move Windows , let’s not talk about Windows 10 of course.
This unfortunate performance lasted a few generations, until Intel finished ruling out ATOM as an option for the low-power market and AMD did the same in an absurd attempt to compete with architecture that was very poor.
