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, Interesting) by Acabatag on Thursday April 23 2020, @05:08PM
There were proprietary unix boxes that made proper use of the 80286
But the PC clone market barreled forward just using it as a bigger and faster 8088.
I am disappointed in the dominance of x86 processors in the list in the article. What a boring subset of cpus.
No mention of things like the Intersil/Harris 6100, a 12 bit processor that implemented the PDP-8 instruction set, and was done all in static CMOS so it could be clocked town to zero hertz for debugging if you wished.
PC clones are dull.