WEBVTT 00:00:00.000 --> 00:00:05.200 Whatever your feelings about Intel, they haven't put out any CPUs lately that have been absolute 00:00:05.200 --> 00:00:11.120 duds. Now, I'm talking like completely bad, but this wasn't always the case. 00:00:11.120 --> 00:00:16.160 As Intel has had plenty of costly mistakes in its history, so let's take a look back at 00:00:16.160 --> 00:00:22.000 Team Blue's Hall of Shame. First, let's go all the way back to 1981, when Intel wasn't even old 00:00:22.000 --> 00:00:28.320 enough to drive. They came out with a line of CPUs that used an architecture called IAPX432, 00:00:28.320 --> 00:00:33.280 which, aside from being annoying to say, was actually supposed to be the long-term replacement 00:00:33.280 --> 00:00:40.560 for x86, which had been around by then for only about three years. You see, IAPX432 was meant to 00:00:40.560 --> 00:00:46.400 be used with very high-level programming languages. Now, high-level here means that the language is 00:00:46.400 --> 00:00:51.840 far removed from the raw zeros and ones that the physical hardware the processor uses. Instead, 00:00:51.840 --> 00:00:56.240 a high-level language is very user-friendly, relying on lots of natural words that have to 00:00:56.400 --> 00:01:00.800 be translated so that the CPU can make sense of them. High-level language support would make it 00:01:00.800 --> 00:01:07.200 easier for developers to code more complex advanced programs, and IAPX432 was specifically 00:01:07.200 --> 00:01:14.640 optimized for one such language called ADA. Yes, that ADA. Intel thought ADA would end up becoming a 00:01:14.640 --> 00:01:19.040 much more important and popular language for the more powerful programs of the future, 00:01:19.040 --> 00:01:23.600 especially as it got attention from the U.S. Department of Defense for its own computer systems. 00:01:23.680 --> 00:01:28.800 However, ADA didn't quite take off as expected in the consumer space, and the processor itself 00:01:28.800 --> 00:01:33.600 simply wasn't very high performance. The reasons for this are complex, but it boils down to the 00:01:33.600 --> 00:01:38.640 fact that the physical processor designs of the day weren't advanced enough to run the complicated 00:01:38.640 --> 00:01:44.000 instructions of languages like ADA. It was a product that was just too ambitious and tried to 00:01:44.000 --> 00:01:48.560 include too many features at the expense of performance. So after roughly five years of 00:01:48.560 --> 00:01:54.640 disappointing sales, the IAPX432 project was axed while x86 continued to dominate. 00:01:54.640 --> 00:01:59.040 But Intel had a much higher profile chip embarrass them that you might actually remember. 00:01:59.040 --> 00:02:05.200 The Pentium 4 was released back in 2000 to great fanfare, and unlike the IAPX432, computers were 00:02:05.200 --> 00:02:09.760 mainstream enough for the general public to notice this time, especially considering there was a 00:02:09.760 --> 00:02:16.080 $300 million ad campaign headlined by the Blue Man Group. Intel tried to achieve never-before-seen 00:02:16.080 --> 00:02:20.640 levels of performance by pushing clock speeds higher and higher. In fact, they planned to scale 00:02:20.640 --> 00:02:26.720 speeds up to a whopping 10 gigahertz as process nodes shrunk. That's roughly double the speed of 00:02:26.720 --> 00:02:33.120 today's best processors. But if you know anything about CPUs, you know that clock speed isn't 00:02:33.120 --> 00:02:38.320 everything, and anyone who bought an Intel PC in the early 2000s learned that the hard way. 00:02:38.320 --> 00:02:43.680 True, these chips weren't just souped up Pentium 3s. Instead, featuring an all-new architecture 00:02:43.760 --> 00:02:50.720 called Netburst, which sounds hilariously close to nut bust? Oh boy. But that meant programs had to 00:02:50.720 --> 00:02:55.520 be specifically optimized for the new architecture to see any real performance schemes, even though 00:02:55.520 --> 00:03:00.800 later revisions introduced hyperthreading for the first time. A key area in which the Pentium 4 00:03:00.800 --> 00:03:05.920 struggled was branch prediction, which is simply the ability of the CPU to predict what the next 00:03:05.920 --> 00:03:10.800 instruction is going to be. Branch prediction is a crucial feature in all modern CPUs, and because 00:03:10.800 --> 00:03:16.000 the Pentium 4 was so bad at it, it kept having to go back and correct its own mistakes. The Pentium 00:03:16.000 --> 00:03:21.280 4 also had a very long pipeline, which is just what it sounds like, an electronic pipe where 00:03:21.280 --> 00:03:25.760 instructions are loaded one after the other so that multiple commands can be kept moving at the 00:03:25.760 --> 00:03:31.280 same time. The P4's lengthy pipeline would often stall out because of poor branch prediction, and 00:03:31.280 --> 00:03:37.200 to top it all off, the chip was very expensive and ran very hot as a result of increased power 00:03:37.200 --> 00:03:42.320 consumption from the high clock speeds and power leakage from the transistors. That said, Intel 00:03:42.320 --> 00:03:48.560 still sold a boatload of these, mostly in pre-built machines built by OEMs, so it was more of a flop 00:03:48.560 --> 00:03:54.560 in terms of performance and customer satisfaction than with sales. Ultimately, P4 ended up being 00:03:54.560 --> 00:03:59.200 the final flagship Pentium chip before the core series of CPUs took over, giving us multiple 00:03:59.200 --> 00:04:06.080 physical cores and a whole new architecture by 2006. But not all of Intel's big flops were CPUs. 00:04:06.080 --> 00:04:11.120 Although Intel's recent Arc lineup marked Team Blue's first foray into the modern discrete GPU 00:04:11.120 --> 00:04:16.560 scene, this actually isn't the first time they tried to make a graphics card. This is the Intel 00:04:16.560 --> 00:04:21.680 i7-40, and it was the first real consumer gaming graphics card that they ever made. It also had 00:04:21.680 --> 00:04:27.760 some incredible DNA, as the i7-40 was developed from a Lockheed Martin project that originally 00:04:27.760 --> 00:04:32.560 provided a visual flight simulator for astronauts in the Apollo moon landing program. Lockheed Martin 00:04:32.560 --> 00:04:37.360 later spun off this division as the company Real3D to try and tap into the consumer market, 00:04:37.360 --> 00:04:43.440 and Intel partnered with Real3D in developing the i7-40. By the time the i7-40 came out, it was 00:04:43.440 --> 00:04:47.760 hugely anticipated, with some in the industry saying that it would lead Intel to dominate the 00:04:47.760 --> 00:04:54.880 discrete GPU space. But unfortunately, Intel only sold the card for about 18 months. What really? 00:04:55.760 --> 00:05:01.280 The main issue is how the i7-40 made use of memory. The card connected to the motherboard 00:05:01.280 --> 00:05:07.040 through an AGP slot, and remember this was before PCI Express was invented, and the AGP slot provided 00:05:07.040 --> 00:05:12.080 a more direct connection to System RAM than the then standard conventional PCI. The idea was to 00:05:12.080 --> 00:05:17.040 have the game store textures in System RAM instead of the cards built in VRAM, with the AGP interface 00:05:17.040 --> 00:05:21.520 allowing the card to access that texture data more quickly, so you could build a card that didn't 00:05:21.520 --> 00:05:28.160 need as much VRAM, and was therefore cheaper. But despite this advantage, the i7-40's reliance 00:05:28.160 --> 00:05:33.440 on system memory made it slower than other cards that had sufficient VRAM to store textures of their 00:05:33.440 --> 00:05:39.360 own. And this was a time when game textures were becoming far more detailed, meaning that 00:05:39.360 --> 00:05:43.840 even though the i7-40 GPU itself could have actually delivered good performance, 00:05:43.840 --> 00:05:48.480 it just couldn't load all that texture data quickly enough. In fact, some i7-40 models came 00:05:48.480 --> 00:05:54.720 with as little as two megabytes of VRAM, which was mainly used for buffering, not storing textures. 00:05:54.720 --> 00:06:00.240 Unsurprisingly, NVIDIA's Riva TNT and 3DFX's Voodoo 2 quickly knocked the i7-40 out of the 00:06:00.240 --> 00:06:05.760 market, and Intel wouldn't release another discrete graphics product for 24 years. I mean, 00:06:05.760 --> 00:06:10.640 they tried with Larabee. I know rejection can be hard to stomach, but man, can't wait that long 00:06:10.640 --> 00:06:14.640 to put yourself back on the horse, you know? Thanks for watching, guys. 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