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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: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 23 2020, @09:00PM (1 child)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 23 2020, @09:00PM (#986207)

    Usage patterns, man. With bad caps, doing work under load and under low load can give different outcomes. So maybe peripherals were brought up in a different order, or maybe bootup stressed the bridges differently, or maybe some init or usage pattern was actually identical to both but had a stochastic failure chance, at which point "error handling in software"

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  • (Score: 2) by RS3 on Saturday April 25 2020, @01:42AM

    by RS3 (6367) on Saturday April 25 2020, @01:42AM (#986798)

    Yeah, maybe. But running Linux I ran X-windows, KDE, kstars, played videos including YouTube. Never a glitch.

    But Windows would freeze, reboot, blue-screen...

    Again, after new caps, Windows never flinched. No sw changes either. Just caps. I have to believe Windows messes with hardware stuff.

    Maybe Linux was loading a better CPU microcode?