The worst PC components in existence?

[NaturalViolence]

MaJoR Wrote:power leakage, a quantum phenomena that no one even knew about then!

Ahahaha, no.  The exact magnitude of this phenomena was debated within the electronic engineering community but the phenomena itself was quite well known long before the P4 was ever in development.  

MaJoR Wrote:Honestly, the Pentium 4 wasn't the worst CPU ever. At the time, they thought, why bother with IPC (instructions per clock) when you can just use long pipelines (which reduces IPC but allows higher clockspeeds) and the march of the continually reducing manufacturing processes to push chips to over 10ghz?

Everyone says this but based on what I've read from the engineers who worked on it it seems more like they didn't think the IPC would go down much if at all.  The real story of the P4 development goes much deeper than the story that the media went with.  And much of it is buried beneath NDA's and other walls.

MaJoR Wrote:While I don't know about the worst CPU ever, the most what were they thinking CPU ever award goes to the Bulldozer.

The worst cpu design ever award would definitely not go to either Intel or AMD.  AMD may be worse than Intel but they're still above everyone else.

MaJoR Wrote:Because even after Intel was utterly punished by AMD during this period because AMD focused on IPC, and even after Intel switched to an IPC focus after the Pentium 4, not even 5 years later AMD decided to do what the Pentium 4 did! Someone at AMD looked at that failure and went "that's a good idea." Wonko!

Despite what the media says AMD did not do what the P4 did.  They focused on increasing TLP at the expense of ILP.  This has the added effect of allowing for better clock rate scaling because they gate the f**k out of everything.