Worst CPUs ever, now with poll!

[ALIVE]

Sure. It didn't beat Intel's quad core processors with hyperthreading at that goal, and it was worse than AMD's own Phenom II processors in single threaded tasks. At least Pentium 4 wasn't a step back from Pentium III in practice when it was released.

Intel went after the gigahertz, because why not? Things like leakage power weren't a problem at the turn of the century and Intel saw no reason that they would become a problem. They had been doubling clockspeed like clockwork (no pun intended) for decades. Had Intel carried out its goal of taking Netburst to 10 GHz and beyond, the performance would have followed and been fantastic.

p4 was something 20-30% slower than pIII thank you clock to clock comparison
p4 was saved by the mere hertz

 

[veri745]

p4 was something 20-30% slower than pIII thank you clock to clock comparison
p4 was saved by the mere hertz

That's what it was designed for though. The downfall of P4 (and Bulldozer) was not that it was designed for Higher Frequency / Lower IPC, it's that it couldn't hit the frequency design goals.

P4 due to the (evidently unforseen) explosion in heat/power consumption as they pushed frequency

Bulldozer for whatever reason (fab, yield, I don't think we have a full answer yet)

 

[ALIVE]

That's what it was designed for though. The downfall of P4 (and Bulldozer) was not that it was designed for Higher Frequency / Lower IPC, it's that it couldn't hit the frequency design goals.

P4 due to the (evidently unforseen) explosion in heat/power consumption as they pushed frequency

Bulldozer for whatever reason (fab, yield, I don't think we have a full answer yet)

intel hit a barrier with pIII the 1.13 version was a failure and aa recall
leaving pIII maxing at 1 gz then p4 1.3 scored the same more or less with pIII but 1,3 was the lowest introductive speed of the design
well the choice of rrambus killed the p4 which made it so epxpensice platform p4 with ddr was loosign aditional 10-20% lol so it was so easy for amd to have a leap that time
how many people actually had a pc with rambus few too few
so i redisign to use ddr without penalty was in order to save the processor
that was the days so much thrills lol

 

[borisvodofsky]

I don't think you people understand P3 is essentially Conroe. LOL of course it's better than P4


That said Worst CPU ever has to be BULLDOZER

 

[lamedude]

iAPX 432 was worse than P4. At least the P4 1.5GHZ was about the same speed as a P3 1GHZ. The iAPX 432 was 4x times slower than a 286 if Wikipedia is correct. P4 probably sold more than every AMD CPU combined so it did something right.

 

[slag]

Gee, and no one wants to mention the cacheless celerons? shame on you nerds

though in the areas of "oops" which I think would make an honourable mention would be the Pentium D and it's hype of being a dual core when it was just two high powered cpus in the same package (sharing the FSB just like normal dual cpu units).

or the pentium bug that intel down played as being "pointless" to the masses.

Why would they? Cacheless celerons were the bomb. Where else could one go from 226 mhz to 448 mhz by simply upping the bus speed and get amazing performance in games of the era. PII processors of that era rarely could do above 75 or 83 mhz FSB, nowhere near the 112 mhz FSB that could be done with the ASUS P2B and a cacheless celeron 266.

 

[Smoblikat]

Faildozer
Pentium 4

 

[Homeles]

Bulldozer definitely wasn't the worst. While it often went backwards in perf/watt, its wide instruction set will allow it to age better than Sandy or Ivy Bridge. Now, there's no point in buying a processor for tomorrow that sucks at today's workloads, but time will be kinder on Bulldozer.

Really, K10 was worse.

 

[Diogenes2]

' Worst ' means nothing, unless you compare it to what else was available at the time..

What some may be calling the ' worst ' , may have been the best money could by when it hit the shelves..

 

[Magic Carpet]

I don't think you people understand P3 is essentially Conroe. LOL of course it's better than P4

Quite right, the early Pentium 4's were hardly an "upgrade".

Source.

 

[jones377]

1. Itanium 1
2. UltraSPARC IIIi
3. Cyrix M1
4. AMD K5
5. Pentium D (Smithfield)

 

[fixbsod]

Thank you, this was exactly what I was thinking despite being 100% intel only and having a P4 (northwood). P4 was crap compared to P3 and AMD's comp -- nw was a nice improvement but only enuff to be somewhat competitive.

Other honorable mentions:

SX chips (386SX, 486SX)
Cyrix chips...all of them... =)

Half of Fame: The entire lineup of Netburst Microarchitecture which means ALL pentium 4s. None of the earlier CPUs were bad CPUs because with every iteration, we saw doubling of frequency but the trend clearly did not continue.

Reminds me of this very famous video at the time: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PKF9GOE2q38

 

[Edgemeal]

Cyrix chips...all of them... =)

Ya I'll vote for Cyrix, I had two pre-built Cyrix 686 systems from different companies and both of them would just randomly crash/reboot, returned both for refunds and built a PC for the very first time using Asus/AMD, it ended up being faster, cheaper and 100% stable. Never looked at a Cyrix again after that.

 

[Idontcare]

1. Itanium 1
2. UltraSPARC IIIi
3. Cyrix M1
4. AMD K5
5. Pentium D (Smithfield)

Now that's a list I can respect :thumbsup:

 

[Magic Carpet]

Cyrix chips...all of them... =)

Although the company was short-lived and the brand name is no longer actively used by its current owner, Cyrix's competition with Intel created the market for budget CPUs, which cut the average selling price of PCs and ultimately forced Intel to release its Celeron line of budget processors and cut the prices of its faster processors more quickly in order to compete.

Thank you.

 

[pantsaregood]

The hate on the Pentium 4 in here is unwarranted.

The Willamette core was launched in 2000. On a per-clock basis it was completely incapable of keeping up with Tualatin or Thunderbird. It wasn't particularly unusual for a 1.4 GHz Tualatin to match a 2.0 GHz Willamette.

Northwood came in 2002. Willamette was struggling with Thunderbird and Palomino - Northwood provided a die shrink to the same 130 nm process that Tualatin used, as well as doubling the amount of cache. Later models of Northwood pushed FSB frequencies up to 533 and 800 MHz. By the release of the 2.8 GHz Northwood "C", Intel reclaimed the performance crown from AMD's line of Athlon XPs.

I am honestly surprised that Intel even called Prescott "Pentium 4." The design changes are more radical than the changes made from Pentium II Deschutes to Pentium III Katmai. SSE3, EM64T, XD bit, VT-x, and EIST were all added to Prescott. The CPU's pipeline was lengthened significantly, and the cache structure was largely overhauled.

Cedar Mill is a direct die shrink of Prescott. There isn't much else to say about it.

Pentium 4 is remembered so poorly because AMD kept throwing Intel off balance. AMD fought a very successful fight with K7, and honestly had no hope of competing with K8. Netburst matching or surpassing K8 occurred very rarely in benchmarks or in practice - not because Netburst was the most awful architecture ever, but because K8 was very much revolutionary and before it's time.

From 2003 until 2012, AMD has been using a largely unchanged K8 architecture for their CPUs. K10 is little more than K8 with L3 cache and a memory controller that runs at an independent frequency. Llano is built off of nine year old technology. Thuban was competitive with similarly priced Nehalem CPUs despite the fact it was built off of six year old technology.

Bulldozer is much more of a failure than Netburst. Netburst was matched against an extraordinary architecture that blindsided Intel. Bulldozer is competing with the Sandy Bridge architecture, which is entirely unimpressive as far as performance gains from the Nehalem era.

 

[borisvodofsky]

Oh, I thought of a good one.

Intel Atom, Everything about the Atom sucks ass. I hate the intel graphics more than anything else, but even when ION came out, it didn't make the Atom all that much better.

Bobcat is way awesomer.

 

[borisvodofsky]

Bulldozer definitely wasn't the worst. While it often went backwards in perf/watt, its wide instruction set will allow it to age better than Sandy or Ivy Bridge. Now, there's no point in buying a processor for tomorrow that sucks at today's workloads, but time will be kinder on Bulldozer.

Really, K10 was worse.

No? wtf, logic fail...

 

[borisvodofsky]

Pentium D wasn't so bad, I remember there was a late iteration along the times of x2 3800+ from AMD, where it overclocked to 4.2-4.5 ghz, on water and consumed 350watt on it's own.

Point is, that thing was BEAST

 

[Homeles]

No? wtf, logic fail...

Bulldozer was a working part on arrival. I think your head isn't screwed on correctly.

 

[greenhawk]

redisign to use ddr without penalty was in order to save the processor

not sure I would call it without penality. due to the cost of rambus, the first time I spotted a p4 system with it was well after it's release (and it was being phased out in the aftermaket areas). But a p4 with normal ram was rather crap, the rambus system was (as I recall) very snappy for similar speed p4's.

 

[SilentRunning]

Why no hate for the Pentium 60MHz that Intel ultimately recalled?

 

[(sic)Klown12]

The Pentium 3 at 1.13Ghz. Nothing but a publicity stunt that failed to even work reliably.

 

[Idontcare]

Why no hate for the Pentium 60MHz that Intel ultimately recalled?

I hated the fact I was too poor to buy one when they came out

 

[Don Karnage]

Everything made by Amd in the past year and a half :whiste: