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 Blue's 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, IAPX432 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 IAPX432 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 IAPX432 project was axed while x86 continued to dominate.
But Intel had a much higher profile chip embarrass them that you might actually remember.
The Pentium 4 was released back in 2000 to great fanfare, and unlike the IAPX432, computers were
mainstream enough for the general public to notice this time, especially considering there was a
$300 million 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 planned 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 nut bust? 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 hyperthreading 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 its 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's 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 marked 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
i7-40, and it was the first real consumer gaming graphics card that they ever made. It also had
some incredible DNA, as the i7-40 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 Real3D to try and tap into the consumer market,
and Intel partnered with Real3D in developing the i7-40. By the time the i7-40 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. What really?
The main issue is how the i7-40 made use of memory. The card connected to the motherboard
through an AGP slot, and 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 in System RAM instead of the cards built in VRAM, with the AGP interface
allowing the card to access that texture data more quickly, so you could build a card that didn't
need as much VRAM, and was therefore cheaper. But despite this advantage, the i7-40's 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 i7-40 GPU itself could have actually delivered good performance,
it just couldn't load all that texture data quickly enough. In fact, some i7-40 models came
with as little as two 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 i7-40 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, you know? Thanks for watching, guys. Like, dislike, check out
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