# 30 years of CPUs at Tom’s Hardware — looking back on three decades of processors, from the Pentium II to Ryzen 9 9950X3D2 — retained record

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30 years of CPUs at Tom’s Hardware — looking back on three decades of processors, from the Pentium II to Ryzen 9 9950X3D2
We’ve been covering CPUs for a long time. It’s time to zoom out for some perspective.
We're celebrating the 30th anniversary of Tom's Hardware. Since the beginning of Tom’s Hardware in 1996, we’ve been covering CPUs. Over the course of the past 30 years, we’ve maintained a comprehensive list of the best CPUs for gaming by reviewing each new release, and we’ve compiled thousands of data points spanning years to compile our CPU benchmark hierarchy. From the Pentium II and the introduction of Dual Data Rate memory to dual 3D V-Cache CPUs, Tom’s Hardware has been there for it all.
It’s time to look back, not just on Tom’s Hardware’s role in the world of CPUs over the past 30 years, but on the broader CPU market. Earth-shattering releases at a given time turned out to be footnotes in hindsight, and bubbling competition that seemed like no real threat turned into seismic shifts in the AMD vs. Intel battle. Hopefully, along the way, we’ll see some reflections of what’s going on in the world of CPUs today.
This is a celebration of 30 years of CPU coverage here at Tom’s Hardware, a history lesson about how the AMD and Intel of yesteryear arrived at the positions they’re in today, and a retrospective of the CPUs that stood the test of time against the refreshes that faded into obscurity just as soon as they were released. We hope you enjoy it.
Ruffling feathers from day one (1996 - 1998)
Ruffling feathers from day one (1996 - 1998)
Like much of the early internet, the true beginnings of Tom’s Hardware (or, rather, Tom’s Hardware Guide) is difficult to pin down, but the earliest archived article concerns the SoftMenu BIOS, which allowed you to change CPU settings through software rather than physical jumper cables; it should go without saying that this article was from July 1, 1996. There were articles before this one, with the original domain of sysdoc.pair.com going online in February 1996.
Tom’s Hardware gained a lot of traction a year later with a CPU review: a look at the Intel Pentium II ‘Klamath’ processor.
Tom’s Hardware’s founder, Thomas Pabst, had discussed CPUs previously, like in a dense CPU guide published the same year, but the Intel Pentium II review marked a turning point. It was published March 1, 1997, more than two months before Intel launched the Pentium II 80522 (or Klamath). It was not positive: “...since I wouldn't eat [Mad Cow Disease] infected beef, I wouldn't be interested in risking an infection of my computer with this CPU either,” wrote Pabst.
The CPU wasn’t officially available, but Pabst was able to test the chip with a pre-release unit shared by two German magazines: C'T Magazin fur Computertechnik and PC Professionell. Following the publication of all three reviews, Intel targeted the two German magazines, threatening to withhold advertising dollars and take legal action against them. Pabst publicized this fiasco and was contacted by The New York Times, which also covered the story. Intel backed down. Pabst later wrote that “...this 'David against Goliath'-incident made Tom's Hardware Guide very famous.”
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In the following months, Pabst focused on CPUs quite a bit, breaking from the performance-tuning guides and general enthusiast information the website had previously published. The situation with Intel made Pabst a “secret star,” so much so that AMD not only offered Pabst a free review unit of the upcoming K6, but also apparently offered to cover legal fees should Intel pursue the situation further.
Although the unofficial review of the Pentium II predates it, the first review that looks most like the technical reviews that have been published on Tom’s Hardware for decades came in April 1997 with a review of the AMD K6, a CPU that established AMD as a true competitor to Intel, claiming Pentium II-like speeds for less money.
The performance wasn’t quite on the level of a Pentium II, most notably because the K6 originally arrived at 233 MHz, when 266 MHz was promised. But it was competitive, particularly when compared to the Pentium II 233, and much cheaper. Pabst concluded the review, “All in all I'm sure that this CPU will be very successful… Whoever is contemplating the purchase of an Intel Pentium or Pentium MMX CPU can forget about this now. The AMD K6 is faster and cheaper.”
Later that same month, Pabst published a proper review of the Pentium II, now using finalized silicon. In DOS games and the 32-bit Windows NT, Pentium IIs showed a commanding lead over the K6, though the battle on Windows 95 was closer. “The world is back to normal. Intel’s managers can sleep quietly again. The Pentium II shows that Intel is still the leader in the CPU market,” the review concluded.
A review of the Cyrix/IBM 6x86MX went live in 1997, as well, showing competitive performance with the K6, but much of the rest of the year was focused elsewhere after the Pentium II/K6 showdown. Looking back, it’s interesting to note the dynamic at play between AMD and Intel, with Pabst using a running gag of referring to Intel as the “Empire,” and competitors like AMD and Cynix as “Rebels.” Although Intel backed away from further action on Pentium II, it wouldn’t be the last time Pabst and Intel butted heads.
The Pentium III incident (1999 - 2001)
The Pentium III incident (1999 - 2001)
The competitive performance of K6 brought AMD into focus as the rival to Intel, which Pabst often described as “almost-monopolistic” at the time. However, AMD really put itself on the map with the release of K7, or as it’s better known, Athlon, in June 1999. In our review, we described it as “a milestone in the whole processor scene,” due in part to AMD’s unique three-way instruction decoder, which allows instructions of variable complexity through all three lanes. Intel’s P6 architecture in Pentium III also had a three-way instruction decoder, but they were segmented based on the complexity of the instruction.
We’re still firmly in the single-core era of CPUs here, so an architectural divergence like this, even before testing, represented a goldmine of speed gains. Rather than releasing several variants of silicon sliced up in different ways, as we see with modern CPUs, Intel and AMD refined their chips and released new versions with faster clock speeds. AMD released the Athlon 600 as the fastest chip in the range at 600 MHz first, but less than two months later, it introduced the Athlon 650, and two months after that, the Athlon 700.
Intel was caught off guard and quickly introduced the Pentium III 600 to counter AMD. The original Pentium III range, codenamed Katmai, was largely a refinement of Pentium II ‘Deschutes’ chips; both were built using a 250nm node, in fact. In our original Athlon review, we noted instability with the Pentium III 600, suggesting the architecture couldn’t handle such high clock speeds.
The original ‘Katmai’ range of Pentium IIIs was short-lived, and later in 1999, Intel introduced a new revision called Coppermine. Coppermine introduced an on-chip L2 cache for Intel, and it was built on a 180nm node, allowing Intel to go from 9.5 million transistors on Katmai to 28 million on Coppermine, as well as push clock speeds up to 733 MHz with the initial range, squeezing out a minor increase over the Athlon 700. Less than two months later, AMD introduced Orion, or Athlon Model 2, which also used a 180nm node and clocked up to 750 MHz. This back and forth of minor clock speed improvements is going to stick with us for at least another half of a decade, so strap in.
The goal, of course, was the first 1 GHz CPU, a milestone that AMD claimed for itself in March 2000 with the introduction of the Athlon 1000. Intel had shown a 1 GHz Pentium III, but AMD released a 1 GHz Athlon first. Intel followed shortly after with its first CPU to hit the gigahertz milestone. Intel didn’t want to place second again, so it went to work on the Pentium III 1.13 GHz, which it introduced in July.
Pentium II made Tom’s Hardware a name in the PC industry, but the Pentium III 1.13 GHz gave it a name among enthusiasts. Our review found that the processor wasn’t stable at 1.13 GHz, and less than a month after introducing the chip, Intel recalled it. The Pentium 1.13 GHz would eventually come back in 2001, but at the pace of CPU innovation at the time, even a six-month delay was detrimental.
In June 2000, AMD introduced a refinement of Athlon, codenamed Thunderbird, and days before Intel’s recall, introduced the Athlon 1100. AMD remained uncontested throughout the rest of the year, pushing Thunderbird up to 1.2 GHz. Intel was closing the curtain on Pentium III and trying to move attention away from Athlon toward its upcoming Pentium 4 range.
Going for gigahertz (2001 - 2004)
Going for gigahertz (2001 - 2004)
Intel was struggling to keep pace with Athlon, but work was going on behind the scenes on the new NetBurst microarchitecture, which was set to become the successor to P6. It was introduced to the world with the Willamette core inside the first Pentium 4. Like most major microarchitecture shifts we’ve seen from Intel and AMD, NetBurst wasn’t an immediate success. However, Pabst noted in our review: “I am certain that Intel will deliver very fast Pentium 4 processors very soon. Intel has finally won back the ability to make AMD's life a lot harder.”
Intel pushed P6 down to a 130nm node with the release of Tualatin Pentium III chips, but the focus was on Pentium 4 and optimizing NetBurst. In March, AMD introduced the Athlon 1333, but Team Red was losing steam. Intel had already released a Pentium 4 1.5 GHz, and it introduced the Pentium 4 1.7 GHz (along with a price cut to the range) in April 2001. With a new microarchitecture seemingly bursting with potential, it was only a matter of time before Intel made its way back to the top.
That came in August, when Intel planted its flag on the 2 GHz milestone with Pentium 4, and beat out AMD’s fastest Athlon chip. AMD didn’t like that. Later in the year, in October, AMD introduced its Athlon XP range, and with it came a sneaky switch in marketing strategy. Rather than include the clock speed as part of the processor name (i.e., Athlon 1333), AMD started using model names. No, the Athlon XP 1500+ wasn’t clocked at 1.5 GHz; it was clocked at 1.3 GHz. This nomenclature climbed all the way to the top, with the Athlon XP 2100+, which was not 2.1 GHz, but rather 1.7 GHz.
At the time, AMD described this shift as an alignment with what it was able to deliver with Athlon. During this era, we start to see more significant architecture divergences between Intel and AMD, so much so that like-for-like clocks could result in vastly different performance. That’s what we found in our Athlon XP review, in fact, with the Athlon XP 1800+ (clocked at 1,533 MHz) contesting the Pentium 4 2 GHz. Still, it’s not hard to see what AMD was trying to do. In January 2002, Intel introduced its Northwood core for Pentium 4, which could clock up to 2.2 GHz. AMD wasn’t able to break the 2 GHz barrier yet, but it used product names to suggest it had.
Names weren’t enough. By the middle of 2002, Northwood had picked up steam and could clock as high as 2.8 GHz; even the 2.4 GHz Pentium 4 was able to beat AMD’s fastest Athlon XP 2100+ across our benchmarks. AMD was working on the Thoroughbred revision of Athlon XP, including a node shrink down to 130nm to match Intel’s new Northwood core, which it trickled out through 2002. By the end of the year, AMD had shown the Athlon XP 2800+ as a rival to the Pentium 4 2.8 GHz.
Despite lagging in clocks, AMD had become quite popular during this time due to the competitive performance of Athlon XP and (most importantly) a lower price point than the expensive Pentium 4s. Still, there was a stalemate in technology between Intel and AMD, and Intel would break it in November 2002 with the Pentium 4 3.06 GHz.
It was the first consumer CPU to clock to 3 GHz out of the box, adding another notch to Intel’s belt, but it was also the first CPU to bring Intel’s long-standing simultaneous multithreading implementation, called Hyper-Threading, to market. With higher clocks and two threads to play with, the Pentium 4 3.06 GHz cemented Intel at the top of the performance charts, beating out AMD’s fastest Athlon XP and even a 3.6 GHz Pentium 4 (no Hyper-Threading) in some benchmarks. Tom’s Hardware actually benchmarked the Pentium 4 3.6 GHz nearly a year before it was available, and had data in time to compare to the Pentium 4 3.06 GHz with Hyper-Threading.
More cores, more fun (2004 - 2007)
More cores, more fun (2004 - 2007)
The clock speed battle from the late 90s and early 2000s was starting to fall apart. AMD had demonstrated that performance was more than peak clocks with Athlon XP, and Intel was pushing ahead with Hyper-Threading to get more work done simultaneously each clock cycle. The first half of 2003 was dull in the world of CPUs as Intel worked on its Prescott core and AMD mulled over “ClawHammer,” which would eventually become Athlon 64.
Athlon 64 would be the first to bring AMD’s x86-64 ISA extension (called AMD64) to the desktop market (it previously showed up in Opteron). It rolled out in September 2003, and just a week before release, Intel launched the Pentium 4 Extreme Edition, which was widely considered a panic switch in response to Athlon 64 while Prescott was still under wraps. Although Intel maintained the performance crown with P4 Extreme against the Athlon 64 FX-51, it did so at a much higher price.
Still, this late-stage battle as Intel and AMD moved toward a 90nm node was important. Intel started marketing expensive, high-performance processors directly to enthusiasts in a market that would eventually get the HEDT, or high-end desktop, name. Meanwhile, AMD designated some Athlon XP chips with the FX name, which signaled high-performance chips with unlocked multipliers.
Intel was first to get down to 90nm with its highly anticipated Prescott core, though it arrived with a whimper. It clocked slower, allowing the FX-51 to remain competitive and Northwood chips to remain at the top of the charts in our review. There, our reviewer Patrick Schmid wrote: “In our opinion, Intel today does not care about Prescott as a processor, but as a marketing instrument. It is fast enough, which is mainly what counts, and since the 90 nm production process yields cheap processors in vast quantities, the Santa Clara-based company gains new flexibility.”
AMD made it down to 90nm later in the year with the FX-55. The FX-55 allowed AMD to close the gap with higher-clocked Pentium 4s, as we found in our review. However, it was becoming clear that the chase for higher clocks wouldn’t be enough. In our review, Schmid wrote in 2004: “Today, the performance gap between the fastest and the slowest processors in our benchmark charts is rather small.”
Intel fired back at the beginning of 2005 with Prescott 2M, a minor revision to the Prescott core with 64-bit ISA extensions, and released the Pentium 4 Extreme Edition 3.73. The tide shift came in the summer of 2005 when AMD launched the Athlon 64 X2, built on a 90nm node, and featuring two cores on the same package.
Intel had released its double-core Pentium D just weeks earlier, which was also a dual-core chip, but the design forced Intel to compromise clock speeds — an important spec given how few applications could actually leverage a dual-core chip in consumer software. AMD ultimately won the battle with the Athlon 64 X2, largely due to the fact that it could keep pace with single-core Athlons in most benchmarks, as you can see in our early preview of the chip.
AMD released more Athlon 64 X2 chips throughout 2005, while Intel rolled out various chips under different Pentium brands, including the Smithfield core on Pentium D. Intel built out the range into 2006, using another node shrink down to 65nm with the Presler core, which was the final revision under the Pentium brand. In January 2006, Tom’s Hardware first reported that Intel planned to drop the Pentium brand, a name that it had kept for over a decade.
In its place? The new Core microarchitecture, finally moving on from NetBurst, which had been plagued with thermal issues as clocks climbed. Built out of Intel’s work in mobile chips, the Core 2 Duo was Intel’s first proper dual-core processor — the “double-core” Pentium D was just two Pentium dies fused together. It was a tide shift.
As we found in our Core 2 Duo review, the base E6600 and E6700 often beat, or at least matched, AMD’s Athlon 64 FX-62, while the supercharged Core 2 Extreme X6800 established a new performance tier at the high-end. Further, it did so at reasonable power levels, finally taking the efficiency fight back to AMD.
Intel doubled down, literally, with the Core 2 Extreme QX6700 at the end of 2006. Although Intel had introduced a four-thread processor previously, the Core 2 Extreme QX6700 was the first CPU with four cores to hit the market. It took two dual-core dies from Core 2 Duo and put them together on a single package. AMD brute-forced a quad-core with the 4x4 platform and dual Athlon 64 FX-70 chips, but there was a major tradeoff in cost, thermals, and power demands.
The coast of Nehalem (2007 - 2010)
The coast of Nehalem (2007 - 2010)
For the first time in the early aughts, Intel was firmly in the driver’s seat for enthusiasts. AMD drummed up some interest with its dual-chip Athlon 64 systems, and it finally moved down to a 65nm node at the start of 2007. But Intel was on a tear, and it would continue its momentum for years to come.
That started by formalizing the success of the Core microarchitecture. Instead of squeezing everything out of a microarchitecture for several generations, as it had done with P6 and NetBurst, Intel transitioned to its well-known tick-tock cycle. First, there’s a node shrink on its existing architecture, then there’s a new microarchitecture on that node, and the cycle continues. Core was the tock at 65nm, and it would move down to Penryn revision at 45nm later in 2007.
AMD struggled to keep pace. After introducing its AM2 socket in 2006, it continued refining the Athlon 64 X2 lineup with a new 65nm node, but Intel was firmly in the lead, forcing AMD to slash prices and settle into the market as a budget-focused alternative to the shiny Core 2 Duos. AMD doubled down in this area with its K8 microarchitecture, releasing a series of efficient “BE” series chips throughout the back half of 2007, which we found were excellent for efficiency and price-to-performance in our review.
Team Red had its chips on K10, and specifically, the new Phenom brand that it made noise about throughout 2006 and 2007. The Phenom X4 series launched in November, featuring the first true quad-core design; that is, using a monolithic die as opposed to MCM like Intel’s Core 2 Quad. Unlike Intel’s Core 2 Extreme, which was reserved for only the most entrenched enthusiasts, AMD targeted midrange builders.
In our Phenom 9700 review, we found that Intel still maintained the performance crown, but AMD offered a cheaper quad-core and offered identical price-to-performance at release. Further, AMD offered support for the chips on both the AM2 socket and the new AM2+ socket, starting a trend of socket longevity that we can still see in action today. With cheaper quad-core CPUs and less upgrade cost, AMD focused less on battling Intel at the high-end and more on delivering in the midrange.
Intel continued to release more Core 2 Duo and Core 2 Quad models throughout 2008, but behind the scenes, it was working on its next major architectural shift: Nehalem. AMD built out its Phenom line, meanwhile, introducing a tri-core variant, as well as several “Black Edition” models that featured peak clocks and unlocked multipliers for enthusiasts, likely in a bid to grab some attention from Intel’s Extreme lineup.
Nealem came onto the scene in late 2008 in the form of Bloomfield chips. They required an entirely new platform and DDR3 memory, but also promised entirely new performance benefits. Intel managed to create a true quad-core chip with Bloomfield, and one that enthusiasts could actually afford, with the range going down as low as $280. Further, it reintroduced Hyper-Threading after ditching the technology during the early dual-core days, giving enthusiasts eight threads to play with.
The spread between Intel and AMD grew wider. In our review of the Core i7-965 Extreme, we found it was 64% faster than AMD’s fastest chip at the time. Despite offering compelling products at competitive prices, AMD was falling further behind. Intel was far ahead; it had a die shrink ahead, and the legendary Sandy Bridge microarchitecture was waiting in the wings to pick up the tick-tock cycle once again.
AMD bit back in early 2009 with Phenom II (along with Athlon II), finally moving down to 45nm. It brought Team Red back up in the rankings, but Bloomfield still held onto top-end performance. In our original Phemon II review, we found that Intel was about 22% ahead of AMD at the high-end, but AMD offered compelling performance given the platform costs. Sounds familiar.
With tight integration of design and manufacturing under one roof, Intel was moving faster than AMD on process improvements, allowing it to keep a consistent lead in performance, particularly at the high-end. Intel had its Lynnfield chips at 45nm, as well as Clarkdale chips at 32nm, but the 32nm successor to Bloomfield came in early 2010, known as Gulftown. And with Gulftown, Intel could claim a multi-core milestone on a monolithic die for the first time with the six-core Core i7-980X.
At $1,000, the Core i7-980X still only appealed to a small number of enthusiasts. AMD helped fill the gap later in the year with the Phenom X6 launch, introducing six-core models of its own. AMD couldn’t match the 980X at the high-end, but Phenom represented an affordable entry-point to six-core chips if you ran heavily-threaded workloads, as we noted in our review. Still, Phenom X6 was AMD trying to keep pace with Intel. Behind the scenes, AMD was working on a new microarchitecture called Bulldozer, which was built from the ground up for a new generation of chips and finally allowed AMD to move down to 32nm.
Bulldozer bulldozes world records, thermals (2010 - 2013)
It’s easy to pick on Bulldozer in hindsight, but leading up to release, the anticipation was palpable. K8 was a smash success, and K10 built on that success, but Bulldozer was built from the ground up, presumably for the position AMD had found itself in the market. Nearly a year before Bulldozer showed up on the market, however, Intel introduced an architecture that still resonates among enthusiasts today — Sandy Bridge.
Intel unified its product stack with Sandy Bridge and set much of the foundation for the company’s releases through Raptor Lake Refresh. Instead of two broad ranges, Intel placed most of the Sandy Bridge lineup on a single socket. It also brought integrated graphics to all the chips in the lineup, at least in the initial range (some later releases cut the iGPU), as well as unlocked the multiplier on some non-Extreme SKUs to compete with AMD’s unlocked Black Edition chips.
It was a smash success. Reviewing four Sandy Bridge chips, our reviewer Chris Angelini wrote: “Existing Lynnfield- and Clarkdale-based processors already offer strong performance compared to AMD’s lineup. Significant gains, clock-for-clock, compound in the face of notable frequency increases across the board (thanks to a mature 32 nm process), giving Sandy Bridge an even more commanding position.”
Raw performance improvements are one thing, but Sandy Bridge was attractive for several other reasons, as well. Overclocking still represented a solid performance boost in this era, and Intel was offering overclocking capabilities at mainstream price points alongside chart-topping performance out of the box. They also introduced Quick Sync to accelerate video encode/decode, and although we have video encode/decode acceleration in modern GPUs, Quick Sync still serves as a fundamental feature for video editing and media servers.
AMD’s response was Bulldozer, which was rumored ahead of release to outperform Intel’s Core i7-950 by upwards of 50%, as well as introduce a true eight-core chip to the consumer market for the first time. If that wasn’t enough, prior to release, the flagship FX-8150 set a world record for clock speed, peaking at 8.429 GHz. AMD would be the first to release a consumer CPU with eight cores, but just about every other aspect of Bulldozer was problematic.
Achieving eight cores in a single package came with significant trade-offs. Up to this point, AMD hadn’t used any form of simultaneous multithreading, but it implemented a version of SMT in Bulldozer. Unlike Intel’s traditional SMT implementation, Bulldozer used two integer units on a core, but shared floating point resources. The major trade-off was how small the integer execution clusters were in order to save space. AMD designed an architecture for a world of heavily-threaded software that just didn’t exist at the time, and it traded very important single-core speeds to achieve that design.
The flagship FX-8150 was marketed as an eight-core chip, with the eight-core count coming from AMD’s odd SMT implementation. Although there were two integer execution units per “module,” as AMD calls them, the floating point unit was shared. This discrepancy was actually the focal point of a 2015 lawsuit, which AMD settled in 2019 to the tune of over $12 million.
It was a flop. Angelini sums up the issue nicely in his October 2011 review of the FX-8150: “[Intel doesn’t] have to do anything at all. Its nearly year-old 95 W parts fend for themselves without even a price adjustment.” Intel had new chips of its own, as well. Just six months later, it introduced Ivy Bridge, taking the solid foundation of Sandy Bridge and moving it down to a 22nm node.
Ivy Bridge wasn’t a big hit on desktop, but it didn’t need to be, given the advantage Intel had already established with Sandy Bridge. Improvements were in the single digits, as we noted in our Core i7-3770K review, but Ivy Bridge brought improvements to integrated graphics to fight against AMD’s burgeoning lineup of APUs and thermal improvements targeting small form factor devices — especially laptops in a new category of “ultrabooks” that Intel was targeting.
12 months after the FX-8150 was introduced, AMD released a revision of the Bulldozer architecture named Piledriver. It promised better IPC and higher clock speeds, which was compelling, as AMD’s FX-4170 released earlier in the year as the first CPU to hit 4 GHz out of the box. Piledriver had a test run earlier in the year through AMD’s Trinity APUs, as well, showing around a 15% improvement compared to Bulldozer.
The flagship Piledriver, the FX-8350, was indeed better than its Bulldozer predecessor, but it was clear the underlying architecture had issues that wouldn’t allow AMD to scale up. AMD’s flagship was only competitive with Intel’s Core i5 options, and power use, although tamed in Piledriver, still meant the chip ran hot. It was immediately forced into a price cut upon release. After two failures to launch flagships, Intel effectively owned the high-end, which it continued to dominate with CPUs like the Core i7-3970X.
Around six months after Piledriver chips shipped, AMD released another two chips, both running at an insane 220W TDP and shipping with their own liquid cooling system. The highest-end offering, the FX-9590, was the first CPU to hit 5 GHz out of the box. AMD had learned the hard way what it had preached back in the Athlon XP days — clock speed isn’t everything.
The dawn of 14nm (2014 - 2016)
The dawn of 14nm (2014 - 2016)
With a 22nm product shipped, Intel went back to a tock and came out the other side with Haswell. Today, Haswell is heralded as a legendary architecture; we’ve all seen forum comments about gaming with a Core i7-4770K more than a decade after it was released. At the time, however, it established a narrative that would follow Intel for the next several years. That narrative being that Intel ships a new generation of quad-cores, each year, with minor IPC improvements and not much more. That’s certainly the impression Angelini came away with after reviewing the Core i7-4770K.
Intel didn’t have to move the needle beyond that point. Although AMD had shipped Bulldozer and Piledriver, a lot of turmoil was going on behind the scenes. Two further revisions of Bulldozer, Steamroller, and Excavator were planned, but AMD largely canceled the two revisions outside of a few low-end products. During this time, AMD underwent a series of sweeping layoffs and executive changes, cutting thousands of employees. Looking back at the time through a modern lens, some long-time AMD employees say that the company would’ve faced bankruptcy had it not been for semi-custom partnerships with Microsoft and Sony for their game consoles.
From the release of Piledriver in late 2012 through 2017, AMD didn’t release a ton of new CPUs. It released some revisions of Piledriver chips like the FX-8370, but we didn’t see any new microarchitecture. And planned node shrinks with Steamroller and Excavator were canned, with only a handful of desktop CPUs surviving, which were repurposed as low-end Athlon X4 CPUs years later. Intel had won.
It didn’t immediately rest on its laurels, however. Hearing the criticism of Haswell for desktop enthusiasts, Intel introduced the Core i7-4790K alongside other ‘Devil’s Canyon’ chips in mid-2014 as it worked on another tick behind the scenes down to 14nm. The result, which arrived almost a year to the day after Devil’s Canyon, was Broadwell. The Broadwell-H range — not Broadwell-E, which shows up later — isn’t v

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30 years of CPUs at Tom’s Hardware — looking back on three decades of processors, from the Pentium II to Ryzen 9 9950X3D2
We’ve been covering CPUs for a long time. It’s time to zoom out for some perspective.
We're celebrating the 30th anniversary of Tom's Hardware. Since the beginning of Tom’s Hardware in 1996, we’ve been covering CPUs. Over the course of the past 30 years, we’ve maintained a comprehensive list of the best CPUs for gaming by reviewing each new release, and we’ve compiled thousands of data points spanning years to compile our CPU benchmark hierarchy. From the Pentium II and the introduction of Dual Data Rate memory to dual 3D V-Cache CPUs, Tom’s Hardware has been there for it all.
It’s time to look back, not just on Tom’s Hardware’s role in the world of CPUs over the past 30 years, but on the broader CPU market. Earth-shattering releases at a given time turned out to be footnotes in hindsight, and bubbling competition that seemed like no real threat turned into seismic shifts in the AMD vs. Intel battle. Hopefully, along the way, we’ll see some reflections of what’s going on in the world of CPUs today.
This is a celebration of 30 years of CPU coverage here at Tom’s Hardware, a history lesson about how the AMD and Intel of yesteryear arrived at the positions they’re in today, and a retrospective of the CPUs that stood the test of time against the refreshes that faded into obscurity just as soon as they were released. We hope you enjoy it.
Ruffling feathers from day one (1996 - 1998)
Ruffling feathers from day one (1996 - 1998)
Like much of the early internet, the true beginnings of Tom’s Hardware (or, rather, Tom’s Hardware Guide) is difficult to pin down, but the earliest archived article concerns the SoftMenu BIOS, which allowed you to change CPU settings through software rather than physical jumper cables; it should go without saying that this article was from July 1, 1996. There were articles before this one, with the original domain of sysdoc.pair.com going online in February 1996.
Tom’s Hardware gained a lot of traction a year later with a CPU review: a look at the Intel Pentium II ‘Klamath’ processor.
Tom’s Hardware’s founder, Thomas Pabst, had discussed CPUs previously, like in a dense CPU guide published the same year, but the Intel Pentium II review marked a turning point. It was published March 1, 1997, more than two months before Intel launched the Pentium II 80522 (or Klamath). It was not positive: “...since I wouldn't eat [Mad Cow Disease] infected beef, I wouldn't be interested in risking an infection of my computer with this CPU either,” wrote Pabst.
The CPU wasn’t officially available, but Pabst was able to test the chip with a pre-release unit shared by two German magazines: C'T Magazin fur Computertechnik and PC Professionell. Following the publication of all three reviews, Intel targeted the two German magazines, threatening to withhold advertising dollars and take legal action against them. Pabst publicized this fiasco and was contacted by The New York Times, which also covered the story. Intel backed down. Pabst later wrote that “...this 'David against Goliath'-incident made Tom's Hardware Guide very famous.”
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In the following months, Pabst focused on CPUs quite a bit, breaking from the performance-tuning guides and general enthusiast information the website had previously published. The situation with Intel made Pabst a “secret star,” so much so that AMD not only offered Pabst a free review unit of the upcoming K6, but also apparently offered to cover legal fees should Intel pursue the situation further.
Although the unofficial review of the Pentium II predates it, the first review that looks most like the technical reviews that have been published on Tom’s Hardware for decades came in April 1997 with a review of the AMD K6, a CPU that established AMD as a true competitor to Intel, claiming Pentium II-like speeds for less money.
The performance wasn’t quite on the level of a Pentium II, most notably because the K6 originally arrived at 233 MHz, when 266 MHz was promised. But it was competitive, particularly when compared to the Pentium II 233, and much cheaper. Pabst concluded the review, “All in all I'm sure that this CPU will be very successful… Whoever is contemplating the purchase of an Intel Pentium or Pentium MMX CPU can forget about this now. The AMD K6 is faster and cheaper.”
Later that same month, Pabst published a proper review of the Pentium II, now using finalized silicon. In DOS games and the 32-bit Windows NT, Pentium IIs showed a commanding lead over the K6, though the battle on Windows 95 was closer. “The world is back to normal. Intel’s managers can sleep quietly again. The Pentium II shows that Intel is still the leader in the CPU market,” the review concluded.
A review of the Cyrix/IBM 6x86MX went live in 1997, as well, showing competitive performance with the K6, but much of the rest of the year was focused elsewhere after the Pentium II/K6 showdown. Looking back, it’s interesting to note the dynamic at play between AMD and Intel, with Pabst using a running gag of referring to Intel as the “Empire,” and competitors like AMD and Cynix as “Rebels.” Although Intel backed away from further action on Pentium II, it wouldn’t be the last time Pabst and Intel butted heads.
The Pentium III incident (1999 - 2001)
The Pentium III incident (1999 - 2001)
The competitive performance of K6 brought AMD into focus as the rival to Intel, which Pabst often described as “almost-monopolistic” at the time. However, AMD really put itself on the map with the release of K7, or as it’s better known, Athlon, in June 1999. In our review, we described it as “a milestone in the whole processor scene,” due in part to AMD’s unique three-way instruction decoder, which allows instructions of variable complexity through all three lanes. Intel’s P6 architecture in Pentium III also had a three-way instruction decoder, but they were segmented based on the complexity of the instruction.
We’re still firmly in the single-core era of CPUs here, so an architectural divergence like this, even before testing, represented a goldmine of speed gains. Rather than releasing several variants of silicon sliced up in different ways, as we see with modern CPUs, Intel and AMD refined their chips and released new versions with faster clock speeds. AMD released the Athlon 600 as the fastest chip in the range at 600 MHz first, but less than two months later, it introduced the Athlon 650, and two months after that, the Athlon 700.
Intel was caught off guard and quickly introduced the Pentium III 600 to counter AMD. The original Pentium III range, codenamed Katmai, was largely a refinement of Pentium II ‘Deschutes’ chips; both were built using a 250nm node, in fact. In our original Athlon review, we noted instability with the Pentium III 600, suggesting the architecture couldn’t handle such high clock speeds.
The original ‘Katmai’ range of Pentium IIIs was short-lived, and later in 1999, Intel introduced a new revision called Coppermine. Coppermine introduced an on-chip L2 cache for Intel, and it was built on a 180nm node, allowing Intel to go from 9.5 million transistors on Katmai to 28 million on Coppermine, as well as push clock speeds up to 733 MHz with the initial range, squeezing out a minor increase over the Athlon 700. Less than two months later, AMD introduced Orion, or Athlon Model 2, which also used a 180nm node and clocked up to 750 MHz. This back and forth of minor clock speed improvements is going to stick with us for at least another half of a decade, so strap in.
The goal, of course, was the first 1 GHz CPU, a milestone that AMD claimed for itself in March 2000 with the introduction of the Athlon 1000. Intel had shown a 1 GHz Pentium III, but AMD released a 1 GHz Athlon first. Intel followed shortly after with its first CPU to hit the gigahertz milestone. Intel didn’t want to place second again, so it went to work on the Pentium III 1.13 GHz, which it introduced in July.
Pentium II made Tom’s Hardware a name in the PC industry, but the Pentium III 1.13 GHz gave it a name among enthusiasts. Our review found that the processor wasn’t stable at 1.13 GHz, and less than a month after introducing the chip, Intel recalled it. The Pentium 1.13 GHz would eventually come back in 2001, but at the pace of CPU innovation at the time, even a six-month delay was detrimental.
In June 2000, AMD introduced a refinement of Athlon, codenamed Thunderbird, and days before Intel’s recall, introduced the Athlon 1100. AMD remained uncontested throughout the rest of the year, pushing Thunderbird up to 1.2 GHz. Intel was closing the curtain on Pentium III and trying to move attention away from Athlon toward its upcoming Pentium 4 range.
Going for gigahertz (2001 - 2004)
Going for gigahertz (2001 - 2004)
Intel was struggling to keep pace with Athlon, but work was going on behind the scenes on the new NetBurst microarchitecture, which was set to become the successor to P6. It was introduced to the world with the Willamette core inside the first Pentium 4. Like most major microarchitecture shifts we’ve seen from Intel and AMD, NetBurst wasn’t an immediate success. However, Pabst noted in our review: “I am certain that Intel will deliver very fast Pentium 4 processors very soon. Intel has finally won back the ability to make AMD's life a lot harder.”
Intel pushed P6 down to a 130nm node with the release of Tualatin Pentium III chips, but the focus was on Pentium 4 and optimizing NetBurst. In March, AMD introduced the Athlon 1333, but Team Red was losing steam. Intel had already released a Pentium 4 1.5 GHz, and it introduced the Pentium 4 1.7 GHz (along with a price cut to the range) in April 2001. With a new microarchitecture seemingly bursting with potential, it was only a matter of time before Intel made its way back to the top.
That came in August, when Intel planted its flag on the 2 GHz milestone with Pentium 4, and beat out AMD’s fastest Athlon chip. AMD didn’t like that. Later in the year, in October, AMD introduced its Athlon XP range, and with it came a sneaky switch in marketing strategy. Rather than include the clock speed as part of the processor name (i.e., Athlon 1333), AMD started using model names. No, the Athlon XP 1500+ wasn’t clocked at 1.5 GHz; it was clocked at 1.3 GHz. This nomenclature climbed all the way to the top, with the Athlon XP 2100+, which was not 2.1 GHz, but rather 1.7 GHz.
At the time, AMD described this shift as an alignment with what it was able to deliver with Athlon. During this era, we start to see more significant architecture divergences between Intel and AMD, so much so that like-for-like clocks could result in vastly different performance. That’s what we found in our Athlon XP review, in fact, with the Athlon XP 1800+ (clocked at 1,533 MHz) contesting the Pentium 4 2 GHz. Still, it’s not hard to see what AMD was trying to do. In January 2002, Intel introduced its Northwood core for Pentium 4, which could clock up to 2.2 GHz. AMD wasn’t able to break the 2 GHz barrier yet, but it used product names to suggest it had.
Names weren’t enough. By the middle of 2002, Northwood had picked up steam and could clock as high as 2.8 GHz; even the 2.4 GHz Pentium 4 was able to beat AMD’s fastest Athlon XP 2100+ across our benchmarks. AMD was working on the Thoroughbred revision of Athlon XP, including a node shrink down to 130nm to match Intel’s new Northwood core, which it trickled out through 2002. By the end of the year, AMD had shown the Athlon XP 2800+ as a rival to the Pentium 4 2.8 GHz.
Despite lagging in clocks, AMD had become quite popular during this time due to the competitive performance of Athlon XP and (most importantly) a lower price point than the expensive Pentium 4s. Still, there was a stalemate in technology between Intel and AMD, and Intel would break it in Nove
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