AMD has been on a roll lately with its CPUs, ever since it launched its Ryzen 1000 CPUs back in 2017. Ryzen and other Zen based chips represent not just some of AMD's best CPUs, but some of the best CPUs ever made. Still, not everything has gone perfectly for the red team even though AMD is past its worst years (so far); let's take a moment to remember some CPUs, recent and ancient, that we really wish AMD had never made to begin with.
Phenom 9900: Goodbye Athlon, hello disappointment
In the beginning, AMD was merely a secondary supplier for Intel chips and later a small-time competitor. Then, the Athlon happened, potentially transforming AMD from an underdog into Intel's equal rival. However, AMD peaked in the mid-2000s and soon entered a steady decline, thanks in part to Intel's dubious usage of marketing funds, a practice that it was sued and fined for. The other primary contributing factor involves what replaced Athlon: Phenom.
Although its name comes from the word 'phenomenal,' AMD's Phenom CPUs were perhaps only phenomenally disappointing. When Phenom launched in 2007, it was AMD's latest contribution to the CPU war that had been brewing since the early 2000s and that AMD had been winning with its Athlon 64 desktop and Opteron server CPUs. Intel finally beat AMD with its Core 2 chips in 2006, which put the pressure back on AMD to respond in kind.
Unfortunately, Phenom dropped the ball in a big way. According to Anandtech, the top-end, "somber" Phenom 9900 scarcely beat even Intel's slowest quad-core Q6600, which consumed less power and was cheaper to boot. To make matters even worse, the first Phenom chips that hit the market had a terrible hardware bug that reduced performance by about 10%, and it took AMD half a year to ship patched CPUs. Phenom symbolized a new AMD that simply couldn't keep up with Intel.
FX-8150: As fast as a bulldozer
For the next three years, AMD forged ahead with Phenom and then Phenom II, which had a distinct advantage in the core count but were weak in single-threaded performance and power efficiency. Meanwhile, Intel stayed ahead by improving its Core architecture, and by 2011, its new second-generation CPUs were running circles around Phenom even with a core count disparity. Despite this, AMD decided to double down on CPUs with large core counts and came up with perhaps its most infamous architecture: Bulldozer.
The name alone was bad enough. Who names a CPU after a bulldozer? But then the new flagship, the FX-8150, could barely match the i5-2500K (not even Intel's top-end CPU) in the best-case scenarios. In the worst cases, it lost to the old Phenom 1100T, which the 8150 was supposed to replace. The 8150 also consumed about 100 watts more power than the i5-2500K and the i7-2600K, which almost always beat the Bulldozer chip.
Anandtech ended its review of the FX-8150 with a warning: "We all need AMD to succeed. We've seen what happens without a strong AMD as a competitor." The publication was right to worry. AMD failed to keep Intel in check, and the next five years would see so little competition that Intel offered increasingly smaller upgrades each generation.
Llano and other big APUs: Integrated graphics couldn't save these chips
Bulldozer was AMD's attempt to compete with Intel in the high-end performance segment, but the company had also set its sights on the low-end and midrange segments. AMD acquired the graphics company ATI back in 2006, and it immediately began work combining AMD CPUs and Radeon GPUs into one device: the Accelerated Processing Unit (APU). Although the Bobcat line of small APUs was quite successful (they powered the PS4 and Xbox One), the other line that descended from the Llano architecture didn't do nearly as well.
The problem with big APUs was twofold. Firstly, with up to four cores, these APUs were basically just quad-core FX chips and didn't have very competitive CPU performance. To make up for this, APUs came with the fastest integrated graphics you could buy. But here's the other problem: Who cares? There's only a thin slice of the market that would want desktop-sized processors for gaming but don't want or can't use discrete graphics. And if you owned one of these APUs and wanted to get a discrete GPU down the line, it was highly likely you would get CPU bottlenecked.
As expected, these APUs didn't do particularly well. AMD even got sued for misleading investors about the sales first-generation Llano APUs would bring in. AMD also failed to innovate on its APUs, so by the time the A10-7890K launched in 2016, it was just barely ahead of Intel's integrated graphics. The Bulldozer APUs even made it onto the AM4 platform and were universally panned for being pointless. In 2017, AMD replaced all of its APUs with new Zen-based Raven Ridge chips, finally ending Bulldozer once and for all.
FX-9590: Burning rubber... and PCs
With Bulldozer, AMD was backed into a corner. It would take years to design a brand new architecture that was free of Bulldozer's key weaknesses (that would later become Ryzen 1000), so AMD just had to try and patch FX CPUs into an acceptable state. There ended up being four generations of Bulldozer, but there was another problem: money. It's expensive to design new chips, and AMD could only justify making new APUs based on the third and fourth-generation Bulldozer architectures. The high-end FX CPUs had to limp along with just second-generation chips.
The 9590 represented the worst excesses of the Bulldozer architecture and was the last high-end CPU AMD launched until 2017.
The FX-9590, launching in 2013, replaced the 8150 as the new flagship, although that's not the full story. The 9590 was originally exclusive to OEMs and apparently cost over $900, but in 2014, AMD finally released it to consumers as a standalone chip, although it was still a tough sell. Sure, it hit 5 GHz out of the box and was the first CPU to do so, but it was mostly just an overclocked FX-8370, which came out over two years prior. In PCMag's review, the 9590 was about 10% faster than the 8370 but barely half the speed of Intel's Core i7-4790K.
The most ludicrous part about the 9590 was the power draw. With a TDP of 220 watts, it consumed about 45 watts more than the 8370 and a whopping 80 watts more than the 4790K. It even came with a liquid AIO cooler. The 9590 represented the worst excesses of the Bulldozer architecture and was the last high-end CPU AMD launched until 2017.
Ryzen 5 5600X: A good CPU ruined by greed
After Ryzen 1000 launched, it was like the Athlon days all over again. AMD caught Intel napping and offered competitive CPUs for the first time in a decade. With each generation, AMD kept increasing its lead, while Intel did almost nothing in response and mostly just offered CPUs with higher core counts. By 2020, it became clear that Intel failed to keep AMD in check, and it didn't take long for AMD to take advantage of the situation. Enter the Ryzen 5000, which launched in late 2020 with a $50 price bump across the board.
That price increase doesn't sound so bad on paper. After all, Ryzen 5000 had increased single-threaded performance (which also translated into higher multithreaded performance) while gaming performance finally surpassed that of Intel's CPUs. However, one CPU, in particular, was affected badly by higher price tags: the midrange Ryzen 5 5600X. The 5600X got the highest price bump relative to its predecessor. While the Ryzen 9 5950X cost just 7% more than the Ryzen 9 3950X, the 5600X carried a whopping 20% higher premium than the 3600X, sometimes making the 5600X a worse value.
And the double whammy was the 5600X's impossible task of being the cheapest Ryzen 5000 CPU for a year and a half. There wasn't even a cheaper X-less version of this CPU until April 2022. With Ryzen 5000, AMD had sent a pretty clear message: Our CPUs aren't for budget buyers anymore.
Ryzen 5 4500: AMD loses the budget market
It was bad enough that AMD had effectively ignored the sub-$300 market since Intel couldn't compete, but when Intel made a comeback with its 12th Gen Alder Lake CPUs, AMD's response was lackluster and late. Midrange Intel chips like the Core i5-12400 launched in January 2022 and matched the 5600X while costing about $100 less, but it took AMD almost three months to scrape together a counterattack. What did AMD spend all its time doing? Recycling old chips to sell as new, of course.
The worst chip AMD offered was the Ryzen 5 4500, a recycled Ryzen APU featuring the old Zen 2 architecture.
The low-end and midrange CPUs AMD that launched in April 2022 weren't new. The Ryzen 5 5600 was just a 5600X without the X for basically the same performance but for $50 less. Then, there's the Ryzen 5 5500 and the Ryzen 5 4500, which were actually APUs but with the graphics disabled. The important part here is actually the L3 cache, which was half that of the 5600 and 5600X. But of the two, the worst chip was the Ryzen 5 4500, a recycled Ryzen APU featuring the old Zen 2 architecture. Tom's Hardware found that the 4500 could barely beat the Core i3-12100 (one of the slowest 12th Gen CPUs) in applications and was noticeably slower in games. Who asked for this?
But perhaps the funniest part about all this was how these CPUs fit into AMD's overall strategy with its RX 6000 series GPUs. Around the same time, AMD launched the RX 6500 XT and RX 6400, which were priced for budget buyers. However, they only had four PCIe lanes available and needed PCIe 4.0 to achieve peak performance. Guess what CPUs in 2022 didn't have PCIe 4.0? The 5500, 5400, and 4500. Guess what CPUs did? All of Intel's Alder Lake models.
AMD's choices make or break a CPU
AMD's poor decision-making often left the brand with terrible CPUs. On a technical level, there wasn't anything wrong with the 5600X. Its price just didn't make any sense to people that had the money for a faster Ryzen 5000 CPU or a last-generation Ryzen 3000 CPU, and at $300, it could never appeal to budget buyers. The 4500 could have been a decent chip had AMD launched it sooner, at a slightly lower price and with PCIe 4.0 enabled. Lots of these mistakes weren't just avoidable, they were self-inflicted.
Thankfully, AMD seems to have learned from its errors with the brand new Ryzen 7000 series. Although the official MSRP of these new CPUs indicated prices would only be a little lower than Ryzen 5000's launch prices, the reality is that Ryzen 7000 is retailing for about $100 less than MSRP. Ryzen 5000 CPUs and the AM4 platform are still cheaper than Ryzen 7000 and new AM5 motherboards, but that's to be expected, and current prices are acceptable.
What I would really like to see next from the red team next are some more low-end to midrange SKUs and cheaper motherboards. If the company can deliver that, then Ryzen 7000 will be remembered better than Ryzen 5000.