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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: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 23 2020, @06:25PM (13 children)
This is one of those lists written down to invite disagreement and gather clicks without offering any value.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by martyb on Thursday April 23 2020, @07:47PM (10 children)
Perhaps you found nothing of value. So be it.
I started programming before there even were personal computers. I remember reading about the Altair in Popular mechanics. The first computer I bought had a 6502 CPU and 4KB of static RAM. At the time I was one of at most 5% of my classmates at a top engineering school who had their own computer.
From this story and the comments posted here, I have learned of processor families I had never heard of before, learned why the TI 99/4A I played with at a store display was so dog slow, additional reasons why the i860 was poorly received... that's just off the top of my head.
There was such a flurry of new processors and architectures in the early days of computing, it was just not possible for me to keep up with all the vagaries of all of them. This story filled in some gaps for me. I look forward to seeing what other comments may be posted here so I may learn even more.
Wit is intellect, dancing.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 23 2020, @09:23PM (6 children)
Are... you serious? I have a similar history and... well, honestly now I'm going to take inventory and make sure I never sound like that.
Anyway, whatever you got out of it there's no escaping the fact that you published a low-effort clickbait article. I mean tell me you don't think this wasn't a "look at our ads, discuss" job.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by martyb on Thursday April 23 2020, @11:53PM (5 children)
You apparently saw the story as being [less than] half-empty. I saw it (in conjunction with the comments here) as being half-full.
Please feel free to submit a better story and I will be more than happy to push it out to the site.
Wit is intellect, dancing.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by anubi on Friday April 24 2020, @01:25AM (2 children)
Marty, I really appreciated you running this story. Like you, I learned a lot about other people's live experience with things I had read of but had never been there or done that.
During the heyday, I designed a 68000 based CPU board to replace a TI9900 design that was having parts availability issues. I briefly ( like in the order of seconds ) considered an 80286, but there was no way I was going to saddle our programmer with programming it in assembler! Ours ran wire bonders in realtime...we had to know exactly what that machine was doing and exactly how long it takes to do it. I was at the intersection of code, control systems, and inertial physics. Even the slightest variations in timing resulted in multiresonant chaos in the machinery that resulted in rejected product. It was either perfect, or it was not. And there was no way we were gonna ship anything less than perfect to our customer. A lot of small companies have that mindset.
These days, I like to use many AVR chips ( Arduino clones ) running simultaneously and Parallax Propellers to do realtime control. And still program in assembler. I still need very fine control over timing and interrupts once time critical sequences are launched. I get so damned picky over timing I even have all the processor cores clocked off the same physical crystal....to eliminate phasing artifacts and the resultant moire type artifacts they produce.
I did not like that 286. I found it too damm awkward to program in assembler and I hate keeping track of segmentation registers with a purple passion.
"Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." [KJV: I Thessalonians 5:21]
(Score: 2) by martyb on Tuesday April 28 2020, @01:41PM (1 child)
Glad you liked the story; thanks so much for the kind words!
You seem to have much more "close to the metal" experience than I. Oh, I'd worked a bunch with assembler way back when, but I prefer coding on top of an OS with all the conveniences their abstractions provided.
Wit is intellect, dancing.
(Score: 1) by anubi on Wednesday April 29 2020, @09:34AM
Thanks! It's an honor and privilege to exchange war stories with others in the trenches.
It takes all types. Building something like SoylentNews to me is a black art. I have my plate full with just microcontrollers. Now, those, I can play with until I know know them and their interfacing to the real world end-to-end. But get beyond C++, and I'm quickly lost. The languages seem simple enough - but it's all those little details that have me wasting way too much time barking up the wrong tree.
Thanks for all the work I've seen you putting into running these forums. For many of us, it's our main link to the other soldiers in other trenches. Fighting ignorance. Trying to build a solid public foundation to store our accumulated knowledge in.
When all is said and done, what we keep is what we share...our humanity, love, art, and science. All else rots back to the oblivion from which it came.
"Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." [KJV: I Thessalonians 5:21]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 24 2020, @04:03AM (1 child)
I spoke to the article, stating information *I* would want before clicking the link, and apparently I'm not alone. But your reply made me go, "hmm, this couldn't possibly be the poster of the link displaying his fragile ego, could it?" 'Til I looked at the username, then, with an "oh no" scrolled farther up to confirm my suspicions.
Like dude, yeah, people are going to question your editorial decisions, indirectly or otherwise. Get over it and ffs don't condescend on some pointless basis, as though being over the hill is somehow pertinent, and even more surreal: unique. Seeing as I didn't bring your part into this, *you* did, answer yourself this: why would I want to interact with editorial staff who takes entirely impersonal things so personally? Again, it's not your performance that was in question so the invitation to compete with it just comes off as unwarranted hostility.
Anyway, I'm going to go put some zeros in a file and you can say, "good riddance, glad I won't have to put up with that ass anymore," and everybody will be better off.
(Score: 2) by martyb on Tuesday April 28 2020, @12:21PM
Did you, by chance, read the linked article? Each of the listed processors had a full write-up identifying the CPU's shortcomings and explaining the problems those caused.
I see that the story summary just listed the CPUs. The original submitter neglected to provide an ellipsis to show that things were omitted. I cleaned up the list and converted the explicit enumeration provided with proper HTML: <OL>, <li&gr;, etc. After, of course, confirming the CPUs listed were correct and in order. I saw that on first read, but somehow failed to add those in, myself. Here is what the list more properly should have looked like:
It seems to be a tradition on this site to not read the linked article, and my omission of the ellipses certainly added no incentive to look further. That was my mistake; I apologize for the oversight.
Oh, and the linked story also provided a list (with explanations) of "Honorable Mentions" — CPUs that were deemed "bad" but not to the same level as those listed here.
Wit is intellect, dancing.
(Score: 3, Funny) by RS3 on Friday April 24 2020, @01:27AM (2 children)
Hmm, you sound like a buyer for my Kim-1. :)
(Score: 2) by martyb on Tuesday April 28 2020, @12:02PM (1 child)
I remember when they came out. IIRC, they required additional external hardware to be of any practical use. From memory, it had a 6502 with 1KB of memory? Apparently, yes [wikipedia.org].
I had the great fortune to have access (via dialup access with an acoustical coupler and a genuine, yellow-roll-of-paper Teletype) to a DEC PDP/8 back in 1972 or so.
The paucity of I/O available on the KIM-1 for the amount of money charged did not seem a fair exchange for me at the time. Finances forced me to wait.
It was a few years later (and after I got to college) when I finally pulled the trigger and bought an OSI Challenger 4-P [wikipedia.org], picture [wikipedia.org]. It came complete with a keyboard, RF-adapter (color!) to connect to a TV for output, and a cassette interface for storing/loading programs. Powered by a 6502, it came with 4 KB of (static?) RAM.
It cost me on-the-order-of two-month's work to be able to save enough to purchase it -- if memory serves for about $250. That was back when minimum wage was less than $2.00 per hour! I got a lot of use out of that little computer until I became astounded at seeing Star Raiders [wikipedia.org] and purchased an Atari 800 [wikipedia.org].
I had a classmate who had a Commodore PET [wikipedia.org] which helped incentivize me to get my own computer, but mindful to avoid a Chiclets keyboard, too.
So, thanks, but no thanks. -)
Wit is intellect, dancing.
(Score: 2) by RS3 on Tuesday April 28 2020, @04:50PM
Ah-ha! A "softie". My roots are hw eng., but I do sw and systems equally well too. I kind of inherited my Kim-1. It has a cassette interface for loading / storing programs, for which you might have had to solder up a couple of simple wires and 2 connectors.
My understanding, and from a hw perspective, is the Kim-1 was made by MOS Technology to be a hardware development system- to facilitate hardware device / peripheral development more than software. Gotta have some hardware for the sw people to work with! People like Apple and Ohio Scientific would buy a Kim-1 and build around it- chips, whole systems, displays, inputs, peripheral controllers, whatever. Very much an open-source development concept of its day- everything well documented and development encouraged- again, more at the hardware level. To a hardware person, Kim-1 was the Arduino of its day.
IIRC, the IBM PC grew so fast because IBM made the machines with 5, then 8 open slots, fully documented the hardware (ISA bus) and BIOS, making it easy for 3rd parties to develop peripherals. And boy did they and fast.
Main sort of philosophical difference between IBM's and MOS Tech.'s approaches was that IBM defined the bus. But remember, MOS Technology was a chip designer, not a full system designer/maker. The Kim-1 had 2 bus connectors, which was too big for lower-end systems, and the 6502 wasn't powerful enough to become the heart and soul of a medium-scale system like a VME bus. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VMEbus [wikipedia.org] I don't know enough computer history to understand, I think an S-100 bus computer based on a 6502 might have been a fairly big deal for a while.
Looking at the pics of the guts, the OSI Challenger looks like a rearranged Kim-1, which makes sense.
Do you still have your OSI Challenger?
(Score: 2) by Bot on Thursday April 23 2020, @07:48PM
I don't agree with your assessment, lemme check *clicky* *clicky*
Account abandoned.
(Score: 2) by RS3 on Friday April 24 2020, @01:19AM
This is one of those comments written down to invite disagr... well, it's pretty much between troll and flamebait.
I've got an idea, instead of sharing your wisdom in this indelible Internet forum, why don't you go buy a hammer and stone chisel and write your thoughts in cuneiform into some rocks somewhere? Preferably below the Antarctic circle.