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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: 2) by toddestan on Friday April 24 2020, @12:07AM
There was even a 486SX2, which was exactly what it sounded like - a 486DX2 with the FPU removed. I'm not sure if they were actually 486DX2's with a bad/disabled FPU, or they never had a FPU from the start. They were pretty rare, and I only remember seeing them in low end OEM systems like Packard Bell, possibly suggesting that they were actually 486DX2's with bad FPU's, and their rarity coming from Intel getting better yields later in the 486's run. As far as I'm aware there was never a 486SX4.