The P4-era Intel Netburst pipeline, in order to chase the highest clock speed, at some point (Prescott) degenerated from 20 stages into a 31-stages deep abomina

The P4-era Intel Netburst pipeline, in order to chase the highest clock speed, at some point (Prescott) degenerated from 20 stages into a 31-stages deep abomination (which would suffer so badly at any branch mispredict). The pipeline actually has a couple stages called "Drive"... allegedly for allowing signals to propagate between key areas in the CPU.