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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: 3, Insightful) by looorg on Thursday April 23 2020, @04:47PM
Odd list, I wonder how they define "worst". The worst one would be all the once that got binned at the drawing board or didn't survive the internal testing phase. Most of them doesn't seem to have been bad CPU:s at the time of release, but more of bad in hindsight or perhaps more correct would be that they became bad in that they couldn't live up to the (marketing-) hype or claims that had been made before or that it wasn't as good as some user 40ish years later think it should have been. Overall most of them appear to be "bad" due to the lack of a FPU or that they where very different compared to what was currently available, and considered to be the standard, and would have required a change of coder mindset/skills/compilers.