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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: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 23 2020, @08:48PM
Microcontrollers, as a class. I worked with one where a silicon defect stopped writes to particular code pages - but not in every unit. "The bug can't be in the silicon" I thought, over and over, as I tried to work it out.
And we were getting rolls straight from digikey, and the lithography etc all was flawless, so I don't think it was fake replicas. Our orders were $1m/y so the particular chip designer was not interested in hearing from us. Cost us $$$ because initial units were fine, this manifested units in the field failing to save data sometimes, or bricking on reflash.
Our eventual solution - treat the X block chips as X-N, blocking the N sectors which, in some (but not all!) units, would fail to write. But we had to find the set of possible failures. What a goddamn pain.
And that's just the worst. Microcontrollers very often seem to not be actually made to spec, and an unreliable processor really screws the pooch.