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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.
- Intel Itanium
- Intel Pentium 4 (Prescott)
- AMD Bulldozer
- Cyrix 6×86
- Cyrix MediaGX
- Texas Instruments TMS9900
Which CPUs make up your list of Worst CPUs Ever Made?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 23 2020, @03:52PM (3 children)
I remember when Celerons hit the 300MHz and PII was unaffordable, some small computer companies released PCs with 300MHz Pentium I. I had a few of these in my hands, they were made of a copperish laminate as heat spreader. These CPUs required a large heatsink, specific higher voltages and mainboard allowing to bump the FSB.
What was the problem, they were totally unstable. It was impossible to perform a scientific computations which stressed CPU and RAM for more than a few hours because it just froze and hard reset was required. And it was not much faster than 233MHz unit.
I don't see this CPU on Intel listings, so I think it had to be something other branded as Intel. Anyone had this CPU?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 24 2020, @01:14AM (2 children)
I'd forgotten about them, t he Celerons were one of the dumbest ideas ever and only existed so that Intel could extract as much money as possible from their overpriced chips. Truly, horrible.
(Score: 2) by epitaxial on Friday April 24 2020, @02:03AM
Are you high or something? Celerons were cheap and could be overclocked easily without even tweaking voltages. I had an Abit motherboard that allowed dual Celerons when Intel claimed you couldn't do that. They were rated for 333mhz but you bumped up the FSB to 100mhz and they ran solid at 500mhz. I had that box running for years.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by TheRaven on Friday April 24 2020, @03:57PM
For extra fun, the 300MHz PII Celerons ran with a 66MHz FSB and a fixed clock multiplier. With some modest improvements to the cooling, they ran at 450MHz with a 100MHz. The BP6 [wikipedia.org] motherboard let you run two in an SMP configuration. A dual-processor 450MHz PII Celeron (overclocked from 300MHz) was £300 for the board and processors, which was incredibly cheap (cheaper than a single PII, for just the CPU).
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