(10-13-2015, 03:42 AM)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? But as they shrank the architecture to about 90nm, they ran into power leakage, a quantum phenomena that no one even knew about then! Power leakage left the P4 limited to around and under 4ghz, and AMD quickly and easily passed them with much lower clockspeeds, thanks to IPC.No, P4 was worse clusterfuck. It required very expensive RDRAM which works only in pairs.
While I don't know about the worst CPU ever, the most what were they thinking CPU ever award goes to the Bulldozer. 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!
Anyway, it's all on wikipedia. I read too much!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pentium_4#Microarchitecture
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leakage_(electronics)#In_semiconductors
Most AMDs failings were due being on old manufacturing process.