Worst CPUs ever, now with poll!

[jhu]

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

Or lives in a cold environment.

 

[TeknoBug]

lol I ran a dual Pentium Pro with 6x SCSI array for 12+ years, that thing was a heater for my apartment at one point.

 

[inf64]

I cannot believe 4 people voted for AMD family 10h.. I mean what in the world?

 

[TeknoBug]

I cannot believe 4 people voted for AMD family 10h.. I mean what in the world?

Isn't 10h like Sempron, Athlon, Phenom 1 & 2 and Turion? Some of Semperon and most of the Phenom 2 and Turions has been good processors.

 

[inf64]

Isn't 10h like Sempron, Athlon, Phenom 1 & 2 and Turion? Some of Semperon and most of the Phenom 2 and Turions has been good processors.

Yeah Phenom 2 was a rock solid CPU. Phenom 1 shipped on rather low clocks on a crappy process node, overal uarchitecture was a solid jump over K8. So no idea why any chip from 10h gen. would be regarded as "worst CPU ever" by anyone ...

 

[Centauri]

I still can't believe either PowerPC option is on the poll.

 

[Paratus]

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

The actual worst part of the computer was the AGP slot. Everything went PCI express so fast. I ended up using a 9600XT until 2007 when ATI finally dropped an AGP version of the X1950Pro. NV never released anything faster than the 16pipe 7800GS, (except the impossible to find 20 pipe Gainward Golden Sample version). So I was really limited in GPU upgrades.

My current machine still doesn't feel like I need a CPU upgrade, even 5 years later.

 

[Paratus]

Or lives in a cold environment.

Texas. So no cold weather.

 

[BigDaveX]

Yeah Phenom 2 was a rock solid CPU. Phenom 1 shipped on rather low clocks on a crappy process node, overal uarchitecture was a solid jump over K8. So no idea why any chip from 10h gen. would be regarded as "worst CPU ever" by anyone ...

I think it was more overhyped than outright bad. In 2006-early 2007, people were fully expecting K10 (or "K8L" as it was initially known) to restore AMD's performance advantage, and even extend it to further levels than previously. There was much crowing about how K10/K8L was going to be an advanced native quad-core server processor, while the Core 2 Quad was just two laptop chips slapped together on a 25 year-old bus protocol. The fact that the latter in fact proved to be the better solution for most users (even if the K10 Opterons did in fact beat the snot out of the C2Q-based Xeons) probably bred a lot of resentment.

Even Phenom II suffered it to some extent, as people somehow got it into their heads that a larger L3 cache was all the Phenom needed to go from being barely equal to Kentsfield to beating up on Nehalem.

So yeah, Phenom and especially Phenom II were decent products, but it doesn't help that they marked the point where AMD lost the performance advantage they'd mostly held from 1999-2006.

 

[Dresdenboy]

Apropos K8L - there was this high performance core project ("K8-2" below) before AMD decided to make an 64b K8 based on the K7.

It seems that the developments on the K8-2 has been cancelled somewhere in mid 1999. One of the principle architects Jim Keller left AMD and went to SiByte.

http://chip-architect.com/news/2001_10_02_Hammer_microarchitecture.html

 

[B-Riz]

Ugh, I am going to get hella flamed for this but here goes:

From a PC Gaming perspective, the i7 920 was a bust of a purchase for me. In hindsight, I was probably better off getting a Q9400, OC'ing it, and waiting for Sandy Bridge.

http://www.anandtech.com/show/2658/19

But, for what ever reason, I did not look at the Intel road-map's back in the day (and was totally seduced by the shiny new Intel Enthusiast platform, techno-lust hit hard, and I finally had the $$$ to get a fancy computer...)

I have always felt that the X58 platform was not very power efficient, but the below has proved my biases wrong, which I am happy to admit.

http://www.anandtech.com/show/2663

I still have an i7 920 C0 chugging along as the wife's gaming computer, and will probably just add a bigger SSD and shiny R9 380-something to it and keep it going...

 

[happy medium]

The P4 and Bulldozer are the worst CPUs of all time.

:thumbsup:

 

[SPBHM]

The actual worst part of the computer was the AGP slot. Everything went PCI express so fast. I ended up using a 9600XT until 2007 when ATI finally dropped an AGP version of the X1950Pro. NV never released anything faster than the 16pipe 7800GS, (except the impossible to find 20 pipe Gainward Golden Sample version). So I was really limited in GPU upgrades.

My current machine still doesn't feel like I need a CPU upgrade, even 5 years later.

I had my last single core CPU in 2007, it was k8 at 2.6GHz or something, and it was quite bad, a 3.2GHz p4 is even worse... even for web browsing a p4 was inadequate in 2010, I think the lack of PCIE (and keep in mind a lot of P4 boards had PCIE) is kind of irrelevant for this CPU, also they made some AGP 3850s and 4670s in 2008/2009 (which were terribly bottlenecked by any P4)

 

[crashtech]

The actual worst part of the computer was the AGP slot. Everything went PCI express so fast. I ended up using a 9600XT until 2007 when ATI finally dropped an AGP version of the X1950Pro. NV never released anything faster than the 16pipe 7800GS, (except the impossible to find 20 pipe Gainward Golden Sample version). So I was really limited in GPU upgrades.

My current machine still doesn't feel like I need a CPU upgrade, even 5 years later.

AGP had about a seven year run, more than can be said for VL-Bus.

 

[jihe]

I cannot believe 4 people voted for AMD family 10h.. I mean what in the world?

I cannot believe 6 people voted for 80286. Seriously...

 

[BigDaveX]

They must be programmers.

The 286 certainly did deliver on the performance front, but by all accounts it was an absolute pig to develop on if you wanted to use anything more than the 8086/88-compatible modes.

 

[WildW]

I was given a PC that had a first generation IDT Winchip @ 240MHz. . . it was supposed to be a drop-in upgrade for the Pentium 75 that had been in there, but I'm not sure it was any faster, just less compatible.

 

[DrMrLordX]

Ahahah, Winchips were pretty awesome at not being awesome. Sorry you got stuck with one of those.

 

[jihe]

Ugh, I am going to get hella flamed for this but here goes:

From a PC Gaming perspective, the i7 920 was a bust of a purchase for me. In hindsight, I was probably better off getting a Q9400, OC'ing it, and waiting for Sandy Bridge.

http://www.anandtech.com/show/2658/19

But, for what ever reason, I did not look at the Intel road-map's back in the day (and was totally seduced by the shiny new Intel Enthusiast platform, techno-lust hit hard, and I finally had the $$$ to get a fancy computer...)

I have always felt that the X58 platform was not very power efficient, but the below has proved my biases wrong, which I am happy to admit.

http://www.anandtech.com/show/2663

I still have an i7 920 C0 chugging along as the wife's gaming computer, and will probably just add a bigger SSD and shiny R9 380-something to it and keep it going...

The 32nm westmeres are pretty power efficient, basically you have 6 cores for the same power consumption of 4, that's 50% improvement straight off the bat.

 

[BigDaveX]

Ahahah, Winchips were pretty awesome at not being awesome. Sorry you got stuck with one of those.

As weaksauce as it was, at least the Winchip provided the basis for what would eventually become the C3. The C3's original design, purchased from the remnants of Cyrix, ended up being so bad that Via couldn't even release it.

 

[DrMrLordX]

Yeah, funny that. When the Winchip first came out, it was vastly inferior even to Cyrix's own products. By the time VIA snapped up Cyrix and Centaur, it looks like Centaur's own designs had caught up to/exceeded those of Cyrix.

Are you thinking of the Cayenne/Joshua chip?

 

[CKTurbo128]

Hmm, the worst CPU ever? I'd probably have to say the Pentium 4 family, as competing processors released during that era were often preferable over Pentium 4 CPUs, especially when AMD released the Athlon 64 processors.

The actual worst part of the computer was the AGP slot. Everything went PCI express so fast. I ended up using a 9600XT until 2007 when ATI finally dropped an AGP version of the X1950Pro. NV never released anything faster than the 16pipe 7800GS, (except the impossible to find 20 pipe Gainward Golden Sample version). So I was really limited in GPU upgrades.

My current machine still doesn't feel like I need a CPU upgrade, even 5 years later.

I can sympathize. From 2004 - 2006, my main rig was running an overclocked Mobile Athlon XP 2600+ @ 2750 GHz on a Socket A DFI LANPARTY NFII Ultra B motherboard with an AGP8X slot. I was stuck with an AGP Radeon X850 XT and later a GeForce 7800 GS, until I was able to snag the Gainward Bliss GeForce 7800 GS+ (a 7900 GT in disguise). Ran great for those years until I jumped to Core 2 in 2007.

 

[waltchan]

I think the FX-4130 AM3+ should be in here a little. Bulldozer + 125W + 4MB L3 cache = Failure. It receives only 1259 single-thread score for such a high power consumption device.

 

[Stuka87]

I still think its strange that PPC is up there. There wasn't anything about them that would make them the worst ever.

I am surprised Cyrix is not on the list.

 

[Stuka87]

I think the FX-4130 AM3+ should be in here a little. Bulldozer + 125W + 4MB L3 cache = Failure. It receives only 1259 single-thread score for such a high power consumption device.

It is. AMD Family 15h.