Worst CPUs ever, now with poll!

[Idontcare]

It is interesting how, in this thread, a "dog" ends up being a CPU that may have delivered great performance/dollar but been questionable stable at time zero, or had a questionably shorter lifespan than other higher priced CPUs.

In other words had this thread simply been labeled "what defines the worst CPU as being the worst?" then we'd have a conversation here that was all about poor performance/dollar, poor stability @ any price, poor stability/dollar, poor performance relative to other higher performing (albeit higher priced) processors available at the time, etc etc

This thread arrives at no consensus because there is no such consensus when it comes to individual valuation of one's time/dollar.

Do you care that your $100 cpu incurs a reboot once per week versus the $150 CPU that only requires such reboot every month? When I was in college I'd say no, but nowadays I'd say yes.

Do you care that your $999 cpu is $999 when you could have bought the $499 version and overclocked, with unknown level of silent data corruption? In college I'd have said yes I do care, now I'd say no I don't care. $500 is gone in one single night for me with dinner and guests, but a CPU is good for months if not years, who wants the cheaper one that might cause troubles come tomorrow morning?

And so that is the problem...price/performance, stability/price, personal time/price, etc are personal and subjective in terms of thresholds and limits. Hence an entire thread full of varied responses, and a market full of varied product offerings (Celeron, K, xeon, etc).

 

[pitz]

Another vote for the 386SX here. A chip that should have never seen the light of day. The original intent was to phase out the 286 platforms and provide the 32-bit core and i386 Enhanced Mode to those platforms with the 16-bit bus. But it never really did work out too well, few 386SX machines actually had enough horsepower to make the i386 Enhanced Mode applications worthwhile, the implementations were often junky hacks, and the engineering efforts would have been better expended on the full 386DX platform.

I put the 386SX right up there with the crime against nature that Microsoft committed by actually pushing Win98 and WinME when they already had the NT core quite refined (with NT4) and a dramatically superior feature set. The engineering efforts were split, which damaged both platforms. (IMHO, had MS been solidly committed to NT post-1997, gamers would have had modern DirectX and a far more stable platform sooner!).

The Pentium 60/66 being built on 800nm 5V Bi-CMOS and having the infamous FDIV bug was another well known disaster.

 

[dark zero]

AMD E1-2100... Is the WORST processor ever made by humans... sold as a Dual Core it feel more as a Single Core from a Pc of the old era (97-2000)
Even a VÍA C3 could be better than that abomination. Even couldn't emulate SNES properly.
A true dissaster.

The whole Atoms are a dissaster... I hope that Goldmont goes Even higher than the Core tier

 

[sxr7171]

That RAMBUS ridden Pentium 4 I once bought. Terrible, noisy, hot running machine.

 

[Cogman]

It is interesting how, in this thread, a "dog" ends up being a CPU that may have delivered great performance/dollar but been questionable stable at time zero, or had a questionably shorter lifespan than other higher priced CPUs.

In other words had this thread simply been labeled "what defines the worst CPU as being the worst?" then we'd have a conversation here that was all about poor performance/dollar, poor stability @ any price, poor stability/dollar, poor performance relative to other higher performing (albeit higher priced) processors available at the time, etc etc

This thread arrives at no consensus because there is no such consensus when it comes to individual valuation of one's time/dollar.

Do you care that your $100 cpu incurs a reboot once per week versus the $150 CPU that only requires such reboot every month? When I was in college I'd say no, but nowadays I'd say yes.

Do you care that your $999 cpu is $999 when you could have bought the $499 version and overclocked, with unknown level of silent data corruption? In college I'd have said yes I do care, now I'd say no I don't care. $500 is gone in one single night for me with dinner and guests, but a CPU is good for months if not years, who wants the cheaper one that might cause troubles come tomorrow morning?

And so that is the problem...price/performance, stability/price, personal time/price, etc are personal and subjective in terms of thresholds and limits. Hence an entire thread full of varied responses, and a market full of varied product offerings (Celeron, K, xeon, etc).

Worse is subjective, but I do think there are some objectively bad processors that do nothing well.

For example, the VIA C3 and Eden processors stand out as being lemons in every sense of the word. They were slow, they consumed a lot of power, and they were more expensive than the competition. Nobody really bought it. Via tried to do the cool "Hey, this computer is the size of a dollar bill" sorts of things but the system was just too expensive and too sluggish. Intel ate their lunch with the Atom processor when they released it.

Now is the VIA C3 series of processors the worst? IDK. There are probably other candidates more worthy of that title. However, you would have pretty much needed a hole in your head to purchase them at any point in their life cycle.

 

[SPBHM]

AMD E1-2100... Is the WORST processor ever made by humans... sold as a Dual Core it feel more as a Single Core from a Pc of the old era (97-2000)
Even a VÍA C3 could be better than that abomination. Even couldn't emulate SNES properly.
A true dissaster.

The whole Atoms are a dissaster... I hope that Goldmont goes Even higher than the Core tier

software issues, I used to run Zsnes on my Pentium 133 and it was not to bad

also VIA C3 was a lot worse even when it was new.

That RAMBUS ridden Pentium 4 I once bought. Terrible, noisy, hot running machine.

Rambus was expensive, but it was pretty fast compared to the competition (AMD with DDR 266 and stuff like that around 2001)

 

[Cerb]

ZSNES scales to high res badly (bound by that single CPU thread), and you need a pretty good CPU for Higan.

 

[SPBHM]

ZSNES scales to high res badly (bound by that single CPU thread), and you need a pretty good CPU for Higan.

sure but it was the best back when I used it with my P133 (I think it was in 98), snes9x worked OK the last time I tried it and it runs fine on Pentium 3 and slow stuff, and higan have lower accuracy modes with lower performance requirements

just make sure you set your screen to 60Hz and it should be smooth.

 

[BurnItDwn]

Bulldozer may have been the biggest disapointment, but overall its actually a very good CPU. (Intel hit a grand slam with Conroe, and AMD still hasnt gotten thier shit together to catch up.) K9 had its share of problems, but I still have and use regularly a phenom 2 machine. (my main machine is a i5 2500 though, the phenom 2 can still do everything I need it for)


Id say netburst is the worst architecture.
It was a huge leap back from P2/P3. big loss in IPC bad tradeoff for raw clockspeed, and as others have mentioned, abysmal power usage.

Otherwise, I had a Cyrix 686+ once. it had such a bad FPU that it was pretty much useless for all games. A friend had a Pentium 75 which was ran Total Annihilation better, and another friend had a P150 which was like lightening compared to the cyrix. It had a nice ALU, but ALU performance doesnt mean shit for games.

 

[jji7skyline]

Bulldozer may have been the biggest disapointment, but overall its actually a very good CPU. (Intel hit a grand slam with Conroe, and AMD still hasnt gotten thier shit together to catch up.) K9 had its share of problems, but I still have and use regularly a phenom 2 machine. (my main machine is a i5 2500 though, the phenom 2 can still do everything I need it for)


Id say netburst is the worst architecture.
It was a huge leap back from P2/P3. big loss in IPC bad tradeoff for raw clockspeed, and as others have mentioned, abysmal power usage.

Otherwise, I had a Cyrix 686+ once. it had such a bad FPU that it was pretty much useless for all games. A friend had a Pentium 75 which was ran Total Annihilation better, and another friend had a P150 which was like lightening compared to the cyrix. It had a nice ALU, but ALU performance doesnt mean shit for games.

Pentium 4's terribleness was matched only by its popularity...

 

[dark zero]

Worse is subjective, but I do think there are some objectively bad processors that do nothing well.

For example, the VIA C3 and Eden processors stand out as being lemons in every sense of the word. They were slow, they consumed a lot of power, and they were more expensive than the competition. Nobody really bought it. Via tried to do the cool "Hey, this computer is the size of a dollar bill" sorts of things but the system was just too expensive and too sluggish. Intel ate their lunch with the Atom processor when they released it.

Now is the VIA C3 series of processors the worst? IDK. There are probably other candidates more worthy of that title. However, you would have pretty much needed a hole in your head to purchase them at any point in their life cycle.

And then ARM came and Atom became so irrelevant (Hey, everyone beats the Atoms) that Intel had to burn billions to make them relevant again...

To make it worse, the poor performance of the Atom (still until now), made the big Core Celeron competent!

Sadly, Atoms are doomed by Core M who is the future. Seems that Intel wanted to do something cheap and they realized that they were doing wrong

Returning to the topic I need to add that ALL AMD E1 and Dual Core.Celeron N are the worst of the worst processors ever released. Not trolling, their performance is not what they are even selling for.. their next step are the real essential ones.

 

[SickBeast]

I say Bulldozer. What's sad is that AMD has continued to develop and refine Bulldozer to this day. At least Intel learned from the Pentium 4 and did a complete redesign. AMD has completely ruined themselves by sticking with a horrible design for years and years.

 

[Centauri]

That's kind of an ignorant viewpoint. Processor architectures take several years and significant financial resources to develop. AMD started working on the replacement for Bulldozer within a year of its debut. You can't simply throw up your hands and ride your failure until a replacement is ready. You need to make lemonade in the meantime.

Intel rode and refined Netburst for 6-7 years until Core was ready and they did it for the exact same reasons. This is only Bulldozer's 4th year and its replacement will be here in its 5th.

 

[MrTeal]

I say Bulldozer. What's sad is that AMD has continued to develop and refine Bulldozer to this day. At least Intel learned from the Pentium 4 and did a complete redesign. AMD has completely ruined themselves by sticking with a horrible design for years and years.

Uhh... Netburst first showed up November 2000, and they were still releasing new chips into 2006. Bulldozer was introduced in October 2011, and should be phased out sometime next year.

If a major new microarchitecture doesn't work as well as you'd like in the first revision, you don't just toss it in the dustbin and whip up something real quick to replace it.

 

[waltchan]

AMD E1-2100... Is the WORST processor ever made by humans... sold as a Dual Core it feel more as a Single Core from a Pc of the old era (97-2000)

Unfortunately, AMD C-50 wins the WORST champion here, like I mentioned earlier. E1-2100, while still very slow, was a huge improvement over the C-50, so I don't think it's the worse.

With C-50, are you ready for 264 single-thread score with only 2GB RAM installed?

 

[waltchan]

I say Bulldozer. What's sad is that AMD has continued to develop and refine Bulldozer to this day. At least Intel learned from the Pentium 4 and did a complete redesign. AMD has completely ruined themselves by sticking with a horrible design for years and years.

The Bulldozer was nearly identical to Athlon II X4 Propus but with added 8MB L3 cache. FX-4100 was a mild upgrade from Athlon II X4 650 when it was discontinued.

 

[cbn]

Unfortunately, AMD C-50 wins the WORST champion here, like I mentioned earlier. E1-2100, while still very slow, was a huge improvement over the C-50, so I don't think it's the worse.

With C-50, are you ready for 264 single-thread score with only 2GB RAM installed?

Worst CPU is actually Sempron 2650.

And the main reason is the pitiful clock relative to it being a 25 watt processor.

For C-50 and E1-2100 I can somewhat forgive because they both have 9 watt TDP.

 

[Paratus]

Hi my name is Paratus and I owned a Pentium 4 3.2E Prescott.

It was my first time.
The FX series was out but the boards all seemed a bit dodgy.
The Intel boards just gave me a warm fuzzy.

I didn't know what would happen.

:awe:

It was actually a fine processor. Not nearly as bad as its rep would leave you to believe. Coupled with 2 gigs of DDR 400 2-2-2 ram and a velociraptor it did everything I needed for 6 years.

 

[Insomniator]

I don't think you can say P4/netburst was the worst when it still genuinely competed in the market in terms of performance. Yeah, the AMD's were better at the time... but the gap wasn't as big as it is today in the other direction. If P4 was the worst then so is Phenom. Netburst had a ton of hype and didn't come close to that, but I wouldn't say it was the 'worst' ever.

Maybe that first P4 1.5 (1.4?) Willy...

I'd say the worst should be one of the chips with critical instruction errors or some Atom/Athlon lower power chip like the C-50. Yeah its 9 watts, but its also 2002 performance... that doesn't help anybody.

 

[cbn]

the C-50. Yeah its 9 watts, but its also 2002 performance... that doesn't help anybody.

It was a mobile chip though.

In contrast, the socket AM1 Sempron 2650 (1.45 Ghz dual core Jaguar) is a 25W desktop chip.

And by the accounts I have seen the actual power consumption is well below 25W for the bin.

 

[MongGrel]

One poll I'm happy to say I've never owned any of the ones listed I guess.

 

[MrTeal]

Hi my name is Paratus and I owned a Pentium 4 3.2E Prescott.

It was my first time.
The FX series was out but the boards all seemed a bit dodgy.
The Intel boards just gave me a warm fuzzy.

I didn't know what would happen.

:awe:

It was actually a fine processor. Not nearly as bad as its rep would leave you to believe. Coupled with 2 gigs of DDR 400 2-2-2 ram and a velociraptor it did everything I needed for 6 years.

You ran a 3.2GHz Prescott until 2010? You sir are a true trooper.

 

[BigDaveX]

I don't think you can say P4/netburst was the worst when it still genuinely competed in the market in terms of performance. Yeah, the AMD's were better at the time... but the gap wasn't as big as it is today in the other direction. If P4 was the worst then so is Phenom. Netburst had a ton of hype and didn't come close to that, but I wouldn't say it was the 'worst' ever.

Maybe that first P4 1.5 (1.4?) Willy...

To be fair, the problems with the Willamette P4 and original Phenom were ones that, when fixed, resulted in their immediate successors being very good products. It wasn't like Bulldozer or the Prescott P4, where the entire design was so misconceived that there was never any prayer of it succeeding.

Also, while the Via C3 wasn't a great processor by any means, it was still worlds better than Transmeta's efforts from the same time period. Plus, it did result in Via creating the Mini-ITX form factor to show off what could be done with the chip, so at least one good thing came out of it. Prescott, by comparison, resulted in the laughable BTX form factor.

 

[TeknoBug]

Oh wow... where do I begin, I'd probably vote Pentium 4 as the worst- power sucking, hot and inefficient. And then AMD MP, Duron and K5 (K2-250MHz, etc were sucky).

Pentium 4
80286
AMD K5
AMD MP
AMD Duron
AMD Neo N40
Motorola PowerPC (forget which one)

 

[dark zero]

Worst CPU is actually Sempron 2650.

And the main reason is the pitiful clock relative to it being a 25 watt processor.

For C-50 and E1-2100 I can somewhat forgive because they both have 9 watt TDP.

Actually the Sempron 2650 with the Big Core celerons are saved because they can overclock and become a real decent beasts. I saw that Sempron OC'd at 2.00 Ghz aprox (Thanks Asus to enable it) with some watt increase and performs pretty decent, however is not enough for mainstream task.