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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: 2) by toddestan on Friday April 24 2020, @12:22AM

    by toddestan (4982) on Friday April 24 2020, @12:22AM (#986295)

    I'm surprised the original Socket 4 Pentium didn't make the list. Not only because of the FDIV issue which affected a lot of these early chips, but also because they ran hot. They were 5V chips throughout, and the current consumption was high. This lead to a quick redesign, and in less than a year Socket 4 was abandoned for Socket 5, with one of the big changes is the chips now ran at 3.3V and half the current consumption. The only chips ever released on Socket 4 were the Pentium 60 and the (somewhat rare) Pentium 66, leaving Socket 4 yet another short-lived Intel socket and a dead end in terms of upgradeability.

    A similar short-lived socket was the original socket for the Pentium 4, Socket 423. Launched with the original Pentium 4 1.4 GHz and saddled with Rambus memory, it was quickly abandoned for Socket 478 which could use SDRAM and later DDR memory. A version Pentium 4 2.0 GHz the fastest CPU available. Intel later released a (rare) 1.3 GHz Pentium for Socket 423 if you're really looking for a turkey. At least the Prescott either used Socket 478 or LGA775, both of which are relatively long lived Intel sockets. LGA775 Pentium 4's can often be swapped for LGA775 Core 2 processors for a significant upgrade.

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