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posted by martyb on Thursday April 23 2020, @12:33PM   Printer-friendly
from the Sorry-about-that-boss! dept.

Worst CPUs:

Today, we've decided to revisit some of the worst CPUs ever built. To make it on to this list, a CPU needed to be fundamentally broken, as opposed to simply being poorly positioned or slower than expected. The annals of history are already stuffed with mediocre products that didn't quite meet expectations but weren't truly bad.

Note: Plenty of people will bring up the Pentium FDIV bug here, but the reason we didn't include it is simple: Despite being an enormous marketing failure for Intel and a huge expense, the actual bug was tiny. It impacted no one who wasn't already doing scientific computing and the scale and scope of the problem in technical terms was never estimated to be much of anything. The incident is recalled today more for the disastrous way Intel handled it than for any overarching problem in the Pentium micro-architecture.

We also include a few dishonourable mentions. These chips may not be the worst of the worst, but they ran into serious problems or failed to address key market segments. With that, here's our list of the worst CPUs ever made.

  1. Intel Itanium
  2. Intel Pentium 4 (Prescott)
  3. AMD Bulldozer
  4. Cyrix 6×86
  5. Cyrix MediaGX
  6. Texas Instruments TMS9900

Which CPUs make up your list of Worst CPUs Ever Made?


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  • (Score: 2) by epitaxial on Thursday April 23 2020, @03:49PM (3 children)

    by epitaxial (3165) on Thursday April 23 2020, @03:49PM (#986049)

    Well it was 1956 in all fairness. Vacuum tubes were the current technology. The germanium semiconductor was only discovered 9 years previous.

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  • (Score: 2) by RS3 on Thursday April 23 2020, @04:29PM

    by RS3 (6367) on Thursday April 23 2020, @04:29PM (#986085)

    Was that when they first used the epitaxial process? ;-)

  • (Score: 1) by agr on Thursday April 23 2020, @05:57PM (1 child)

    by agr (7134) on Thursday April 23 2020, @05:57PM (#986139)

    There were othe vacuum tube machines of the same era, such as the IBM 650, that had a decent design.

    • (Score: 2) by RS3 on Friday April 24 2020, @01:01AM

      by RS3 (6367) on Friday April 24 2020, @01:01AM (#986315)

      Kept the room nice and warm too.