Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “Intel’s Worst Products Ever”.
Whatever your feelings about Intel, they haven’t put out any CPUs lately that have been absolute Duds now, I’m talking like completely bad, but this wasn’t always the case as Intel has had plenty of costly mistakes in its history. So, let’s take a look back at Team Blues Hall of Shame. First, let’s go all the way back to 1981, when Intel wasn’t even old enough to drive, they came out with a line of CPUs that used an architecture called iapx432 which, aside from being annoying to say, was actually supposed to be the long-term replacement for x86, which Had been around by then for only about three years, you see, iapx 432 was meant to be used with very high level programming languages now high level here means that the language is far removed from the raw zeros and ones that the physical Hardware the processor uses Instead, a high level language is very user-friendly, relying on lots of natural words that have to be translated so that the CPU can make sense of them. High-Level language support would make it easier for developers to code more complex, Advanced programs and iapx 432 was specifically optimized for one such language called Ada. Yes, that ADA Intel thought Ada would end up becoming a much more important and popular language for the more powerful programs of the future, especially as it got attention from the U.S Department of Defense for its own computer systems.
However, Ada didn’t quite take off as expected. In the consumer space and the processor itself simply wasn’t very high performance. The reasons for this are complex, but it boils down to the fact that the physical processor designs of the day weren’t Advanced enough to run the complicated instructions of languages like Ada. It was a product that was just too ambitious and tried to include too many features at the expense of performance. So, after roughly five years of disappointing sales, the iapx-432 project was axed while x86 continued to dominate, but Intel had a much higher profile chip embarrassed them.
That you might actually remember we’ll tell you all about that. One right after we thank War Thunder for sponsoring this video War Thunder is a free-to-play, detailed and immersive combat game with cross-platform play. You can choose your own play style, you can play fast-paced, PVP matches or enjoy more realistic tactical experiences with a fleet of over 2 000 historically accurate vehicles from the past Century.
It has something for all tastes, check out War, Thunder at the link below and start playing for free with premium bonuses for signing up today, the Pentium 4 was released back in 2000 to Great Fanfare and, unlike the iapx 432 computers were mainstream enough for the general Public to notice this time, especially considering there was a 300 million dollar ad campaign headlined by the Blue Man Group Intel tried to achieve never before seen levels of performance by pushing clock speeds higher and higher. In fact, they plan to scale speeds up to a whopping 10 gigahertz as process nodes shrunk, that’s roughly double the speed of today’s best processors, but if you know anything about CPUs, you know that clock speed, isn’t everything and anyone who bought an Intel PC in the Early 2000s learned that the hard way true, these chips, weren’t just souped-up Pentium 3s, instead featuring an all-new architecture, called netburst, which sounds hilariously close to not lost oh boy, but that meant programs had to be specifically optimized for the new architecture to see any real performance Schemes, even though later revisions introduced hyper threading for the first time, a key area in which the Pentium 4 struggled was Branch prediction, which is simply the ability of the CPU to predict what the next instruction is going to be. Branch prediction is a crucial feature in all modern CPUs and because the Pentium 4 was so bad at it, it kept having to go back and correct his own mistakes.
The Pentium 4 also had a very long pipeline, which is just what it sounds like an electronic pipe where instructions are loaded one after the other, so that multiple commands can be kept moving at the same time, the P4 is lengthy. Pipeline would often stall out because of poor Branch prediction and to top it all off. The chip was very expensive and ran very hot as a result of increased power. Consumption from the high clock, speeds and power leakage from the transistors that said, Intel still sold a boatload of these, mostly in pre-built machines built by oems. So it was more of a flop in terms of performance and customer satisfaction than with sales.
Ultimately, P4 ended up being the final Flagship Pentium chip before the Core Series of CPUs took over, giving us multiple physical cores and a whole new architecture by 2006, but not all of Intel’s big flops were CPUs. Although Intel’s recent Arc lineup marks team Blue’s first foray into the modern, discrete GPU scene, this actually isn’t the first time they tried to make a graphics card. This is the Intel i740 and it was the first real consumer gaming graphics card that they ever made. It also had some incredible DNA, as the i-740 was developed from a Lockheed Martin project that originally provided a visual flight simulator for astronauts in the Apollo moon landing program Lockheed Martin later spun off this division as the company real 3D to try and tap into the Consumer market and Intel partnered with real 3D in developing the i-740 by the time the i-740 came out.
It was hugely anticipated with some in the industry saying that it would lead Intel to dominate the discrete GPU space, but unfortunately, intel only sold the card for about 18 months really well. The main issue is how the i-740 made use of memory. The card connected to the motherboard through an AGP slot now remember this was before PCI Express, was invented and the AGP slot provided a more direct connection to system Ram than the then standard conventional PCI.
The idea was to have the game store, textures and system Ram. Instead of the card’s built-in vram with the AGP interface, allowing the card to access that texture data more quickly, so you could build a car that didn’t need as much vram and was therefore cheaper. But despite this Advantage, the i-740s Reliance on system memory made it slower than other cards that had sufficient vram to store textures of their own, and this was a time when game textures were becoming far more detailed, meaning that even though the i-740 GPU itself could have Actually delivered good performance, it just couldn’t load all that texture data quickly enough.
In fact, some i-740 models came with as little as 2 megabytes of vram, which was mainly used for buffering, not storing textures. Unsurprisingly, nvidia’s Riva, TNT and 3dfx’s Voodoo 2 quickly knocked the i-740 out of the market and Intel wouldn’t release another discrete graphics product. For 24 years I mean they tried with larabee. I know rejection can be hard to stomach, but man can’t wait that long to put yourself back on the horse.
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