I specifically remember reading an Anandtech article review on Pentium M and it showed how it was actually faster than Intel's desktop processors at much better efficiency.
that was probably more from me.
It was back when i was partnered with an intel insider company that did servers in bulk.
Fun to say i got a lot of ES chips for free to play with, and destroy after testing.
Yes, you heard me correct, we had orders to destory samples when finished, as you could not trade or sell them on the market.
But it was the Yonah your talking about.
The OG Pentium M that we would put on either special boards or a socket adapter of some sort, and it would devistate super pi runs which AMD's had the top score to. Yonah then turned into Merom and then later Penryn which was the birth of Core2Solo which later AMD made fun of Intel because they basically put 2 Penryn dies on 1 PCB and came the birth of the Core2Duo.
But playing with Yonah's were fun... and i mean insanely fun.
Laptop CPU's given desktop Power with desktop cooling... well... you can guess the rest.
My friend made the analogy at the time, its like putting a hiyabusa engine in a civic, and then giving that engine all the large stage turbo's you could only put in a car frame, along with the intercooler and cooling gear, and then adding NOS on top.
But back to the destroy comment... i lost count on how many Wolfdale/Yorkfield i lost from experimenting with electron degredation. That is the generation where we saw it impact the most.
You can push a Q6600 Kentsfield with insane voltages and it would still last longer then your first born though elementry.
But a Yorktown, you'd e lucky if she lasted though the night on a long date.
Then came the i7-920... One of 2 cpu's i could not kill, the other being a Q6600 unless you really did something stupid like ran 1.6v+ though it.
To say that a CPU that wasn't the best at the time and was blown away just over a year later with Conroe belongs on the "best CPU's" list is ill-advised.
That is why i said the manchester Xp 3800+ or the Opty 160, deserves to be in the AMD hall of fame.
Intel litterally kill stole the first place from AMD when they rolled back from pentium 4, to pentium 3 - Mobile, and then to Core2.
But yes putting that cpu in honorable mention and not the actual list including not even mentioning the i7-920 makes that list about as believable as BCC news. (sarcasm...)
And yes Zen1 also needs its hall of fame, as that was a OMGWOW moment compared to Phenom. Also what brought AMD back from the almost grave and what made them what they are.
And again the first and second gen Threadripper. He completely misses these guys too.