SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
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, Insightful) by toddestan on Friday April 24 2020, @12:36AM
I'm surprised the original Celeron didn't make the list. Basically a Pentium 2 with no L2 cache, this was one of the slowest CPU's available when it was new. The previous generation Pentium MMX was quite often faster. Not to be confused with the second generation Celeron, where the Celeron 300A is probably one of Intel's greatest hits, mostly because it was easily overclockable and Intel didn't bother to disable SMP on it.
The Prescott Celerons were also pretty terrible. The Precott was not a great CPU, and lopping off half of the L2 cache was about the worst thing you could do to it. And to top it off, for some reason Intel decided to name it the "Celeron D". The "Pentium D" was a dual core chip, leading to believe that this was a dual core Celeron - but nope! It was a single core chip.