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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: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 24 2020, @06:53PM (1 child)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 24 2020, @06:53PM (#986640)

    The entire point of the 386SX, unlike the later 486SX was that it was bus compatible with the 286, allowing the clone box manufacturers to reuse existing 286 chipset designs with the 386 processor.

    I know this because I have a 1989 Gateway 2000 386SX/16 sitting above me in storage. The motherboard got swapped out over the years, but as originally sold it had a 250W industrial power supply with a giant mechanical switch out the side. A full height (10.5"?) 60 megabyte MFM hard disk with a paper bad sector list in a pouch atop it, 4 megabytes of ram on either 2x2MB or 4x1MB SIMMs (had either 4 or 8 simm sockets, I forget which.) with a full length MFM/SERIAL/Parallel I/O card and a I think half length (only reached to the end of the motherboard, not the full length guides on the inner front face of the case.) The video card was an ATI VGA/EGA Combo card, maybe a Wonder? It had no audio onboard except the old style PC speaker which could do some really low fidelity mono-channel modulated sound, but usually was only used for different tones of beep. No Sound card. I eventually got a Thunderboard (8 bit Sound Blaster Clone) which netted me a game port, and later some secondhand ethernet cards for it. Managed to run windows 3.11 and later WFW 3.11 on it. Played Space Quest III and then IV (barely, got a 486 around that time that most of that game was played on.) all kinds of shareware games, my first internal 2400 baud modem, and a variety of other fun stuff after.

    The soldered on-board battery eventually died on it and after jumpering it to get the system to boot I think the RTC blew up. Either that or when I tried to swap the memory back I used the wrong speed simms. One of these days I will examine it and see if I can get it booting again. For the record that 250W power supply still runs good and hard, but I have had more compact cases to use in the years since. That original was about the footprint of a 26-32" TV and took up most of a wide desk or table. But it was heavy enough to handle a large monitor set atop it :)

  • (Score: 2) by RS3 on Saturday April 25 2020, @02:07AM

    by RS3 (6367) on Saturday April 25 2020, @02:07AM (#986802)

    Soldered-on battery one of those 3-cell shrink-wrapped ones? If so, likely a NiCad and might be leaking. If so, it's usually fairly easily cleaned. I use warm water, dish detergent, and an old toothbrush. Dry it well of course. There may be a connector for an external battery. RTC might be fairly easily replaced.