30 years of CPUs at Tom’s Hardware — looking back on three decades of processors, from the Pentium II to Ryzen 9 9950X3D2
Tom's Hardware is celebrating its 30th anniversary of covering CPUs, looking back on three decades of processors from the Pentium II to the Ryzen 9 9950X3D2. The website has maintained a comprehensive list of the best CPUs for gaming and compiled thousands of data points over the years. The history of Tom's Hardware and the CPU market is a story of earth-shattering releases, bubbling competition, and seismic shifts in the AMD vs Intel battle.
- ▪Tom's Hardware has been covering CPUs since 1996, with its first archived article concerning the SoftMenu BIOS.
- ▪The website gained traction with a CPU review of the Intel Pentium II 'Klamath' processor in 1997.
- ▪Tom's Hardware has compiled thousands of data points over the years to create a CPU benchmark hierarchy.
Tom's Hardware files mainly under tech. We currently carry 411 of its stories.
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Story provenance
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Record
| Original publisher | Tom's Hardware |
| Canonical URL | https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/cpus/30-years-of-cpus-at-toms-hardware-looking-back-on-three-decades-of-processors-from-the-pentium-ii-to-ryzen-9-9950x3d2 |
| Publication time | Fri, 31 Jul 2026 15:13:36 +0000 |
| Retrieval time | 2026-07-31T15:18:03.801Z |
| Last seen | 2026-07-31T15:18:03.801Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | ap-KkJCwVpFU · 1 stories |
| Cluster logic | Grouped by semantic title/content similarity across sources within a rolling window. Same-publisher template collisions are excluded from coverage comparison. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
Rights status (four layers)
WeSearch handling by dimension
| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
PC Components CPUs 30 years of CPUs at Tom’s Hardware — looking back on three decades of processors, from the Pentium II to Ryzen 9 9950X3D2 News By Jake Roach Published 31 July 2026 We’ve been covering CPUs for a long time. It’s time to zoom out for some perspective. When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission. Here’s how it works. (Image credit: Tom's Hardware) Jump To: Ruffling feathers from day one (1996 - 1998) The Pentium III incident (1999 - 2001) Going for gigahertz (2001 - 2004) More cores, more fun (2004 - 2007) The coast of Nehalem (2007 - 2010) Bulldozer bulldozes world records, thermals (2010 - 2013) The dawn of 14nm (2014 - 2016) Feeling Zen (2017 - 2020) Forging a new path (2021 - 2024) Reckoning with the real world (2024 - today) Copy…
Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at Tom's Hardware.
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