Worst CPUs ever, now with poll!

[TurtleCrusher]

The only really interesting Prescott was the rarest, the dual die chip extreme edition on the top end bus. It was HT enabled, so it was 4 threads and, if you could manage to dissipate the incredible (for the time) heat output, it could clock very high. It was just so freaking expensive!

It's still really expensive. A $6 Core CPU on s775 absolutely wrecks it though.

 

[dark zero]

Can we add AMD Carrizo right now?
It was a massive dissaster for them.

 

[burninatortech4]

Can we add AMD Carrizo right now?
It was a massive dissaster for them.

Besides being construction cores what about Carrizo was a disaster compared to say, Kaveri or Richland/Trinity? I'm not doubting your choice I'm just curious why Carrizo specifically?

 

[BigDaveX]

In order for it to qualify as a "disaster", AMD would have had to have been putting some real effort behind Carrizo. All they really wanted it to do was recoup some of the R&D costs and help establish the groundwork for Socket AM4, and in that aim at least I'd say they succeeded.

Likewise, the Presler/Cedar Mill Pentium 4/Ds got absolutely curbstomped by the Athlon 64s of the time, but all they really needed to be was a way for Intel to work the kinks out of their 65nm process (and the fact that they also happened to overclock like crazy was a nice little bonus).

 

[slashy16]

I don't really understand the hate for the Pentium4. I bought a Pentium4 3.06ghz, which was the first Intel consumer level CPU with Hyperthreading. To this day it will go down as one of the best CPU purchases I have ever made. HT made the system absolutely fly for multitasking and overclocking it to 3.6ghz made it a killer in games. The system was in use for nearly 6 years and never had any issue with it.

Best CPUs ever which I have all owned.
Celeron 300mhz -> 450mhz
Intel P3 600mhz -> 850mhz
Pentium 4 3.06ghz -> 3.6GHZ (HT Amazing)
Intel Q6600 2.4ghz -> 3ghz
I7 990x 3.46ghz -> 4.45ghz - Still running today
I7 7700K stock - Still the fastest CPU I have ever used in a PC
AMD 2700x - Great Multitasking and first AMD CPU I have owned personally.

Worst CPUs that I have experience with:
Pentium 4 Willamete or whatever it was called 1.4/1.5ghz - Frequency too low and process lacked the ability to OC much.
Intel Pentium D - heat \ performance \ platform issues(boards bending)
Any AMD CPU paired with a via chipset

 

[TheGiant]

Intel p4 celero with 0 L2 cache

2GHz CPU with x86 FPU speed of p2-300

 

[Abwx]

Any AMD CPU paired with a via chipset

Via chipsets had some advantages, i used a Via KT133 with a Duron and then switched the HDD with the installed OS (W2K) on a Pentium III, wich was using a Via Appollo 133, and then used it, still unmodded, with a Via KT800 (DDR RAM) with an Athlon 64....

Otherwise the worse CPU i had was a Celeron D, although it was rather the Dell PC using it that was kind of a disaster....

 

[BigDaveX]

I don't really understand the hate for the Pentium4.

...

Pentium 4 Willamete or whatever it was called 1.4/1.5ghz - Frequency too low and process lacked the ability to OC much.
Intel Pentium D - heat \ performance \ platform issues(boards bending)

You just answered your own question. 😛

Seriously though, the Northwood generation might have been good (though Intel arguably got lucky in that AMD's initial 130nm process turned out to be a dud, stranding the Athlon XP at low clockspeeds for the better part of a year), but Willamette was underwhelming, Prescott was absolute garbage, and probably the only reason they even bothered releasing Cedar Mill was to fine-tune their 65nm process ahead of Core 2's release. 1 good design out of 4 isn't exactly the best batting ratio.

 

[Paratus]

You just answered your own question. 😛

Seriously though, the Northwood generation might have been good (though Intel arguably got lucky in that AMD's initial 130nm process turned out to be a dud, stranding the Athlon XP at low clockspeeds for the better part of a year), but Willamette was underwhelming, Prescott was absolute garbage, and probably the only reason they even bothered releasing Cedar Mill was to fine-tune their 65nm process ahead of Core 2's release. 1 good design out of 4 isn't exactly the best batting ratio.

Hey the Prescott wasn’t as bad as all that.

I had one from 2004-2010. The hyperthreading made it reasonably snappy for multitasking.

With 2 Gigs of DDR 400 at tight 2-2-2 timings, a 10K raptor boot drive, and rocking an AGP Radeon 1950 Pro 512 I managed to play Crysis on it.

 

[epsilon84]

Hey the Prescott wasn’t as bad as all that.

I had one from 2004-2010. The hyperthreading made it reasonably snappy for multitasking.

With 2 Gigs of DDR 400 at tight 2-2-2 timings, a 10K raptor boot drive, and rocking an AGP Radeon 1950 Pro 512 I managed to play Crysis on it.

The worst thing about Prescott was the power consumption, and the fact that it wasn't really any faster clock for clock than Northwood, in fact it had slightly lower IPC IIRC because Intel lengthened the pipeline even further in a bid to reach higher clocks, which ultimately failed.

But I would say that HT was probably ahead of its time, back then I had an Athlon XP and P4 Northwood and they were pretty close in benchmarks but actual smoothness of the system was better on the P4, and obviously multitasking as you said.

 

[slashy16]

You just answered your own question. 😛

Seriously though, the Northwood generation might have been good (though Intel arguably got lucky in that AMD's initial 130nm process turned out to be a dud, stranding the Athlon XP at low clockspeeds for the better part of a year), but Willamette was underwhelming, Prescott was absolute garbage, and probably the only reason they even bothered releasing Cedar Mill was to fine-tune their 65nm process ahead of Core 2's release. 1 good design out of 4 isn't exactly the best batting ratio.

yes, but saying P4, in general, is bad is stupid. Willamette at 1.5ghz was a decent upgrade to the P3-1000. The reason it was an awful chip is that you were forced to
buy RDRAM which was insanely expensive and at the time we were just a few years removed from massive SD ram prices. Northwood was great but, what people
forget is what made it great was the DDR chipset and then the 800mhz FSB with dual channel DDR.

I remember being 14 and Intel launching their granite bay dual channel DDR chipset, I worked at a pizzashop at night and worked my ass off to buy the asus P4G8X,
DDR400 DC kit, and a S478 celeron 2ghz. It would be another 2 months before I could afford the P4 3.06HT. That celeron managed to overclock to near 3ghz and was one of the best Intel bang for the bucks ever.

 

[Paratus]

The worst thing about Prescott was the power consumption, and the fact that it wasn't really any faster clock for clock than Northwood, in fact it had slightly lower IPC IIRC because Intel lengthened the pipeline even further in a bid to reach higher clocks, which ultimately failed.

But I would say that HT was probably ahead of its time, back then I had an Athlon XP and P4 Northwood and they were pretty close in benchmarks but actual smoothness of the system was better on the P4, and obviously multitasking as you said.

Yup. From a generation to generation it was a disappointment going from Northwood to Presscott but it wasn’t actually a bad CPU for day to day use.

I do find it funny how we worried about the power draw on a Prescott which I powered with 400-500w PSUs and now I have an 850w for a 180W Threadripper and a 200-300W Vega.

 

[epsilon84]

Yup. From a generation to generation it was a disappointment going from Northwood to Presscott but it wasn’t actually a bad CPU for day to day use.

I do find it funny how we worried about the power draw on a Prescott which I powered with 400-500w PSUs and now I have an 850w for a 180W Threadripper and a 200-300W Vega.

Yeah back then 130W for a CPU was practically unheard of. Some perspective is needed though, I would estimate your TR to be probably ~30 times as powerful as a P4 Prescott in MT workloads... twice the IPC (rough guess) and 16 times the cores/thread... we've come a long way in 15 years, even though clockspeeds have barely budged.

 

[Paratus]

Yeah back then 130W for a CPU was practically unheard of. Some perspective is needed though, I would estimate your TR to be probably ~30 times as powerful as a P4 Prescott in MT workloads... twice the IPC (rough guess) and 16 times the cores/thread... we've come a long way in 15 years, even though clockspeeds have barely budged.

Well half that because I went with the 8C/16T 1900X. It was a complete rebuild so the 1900X saved me some money and will give me an excuse to upgrade in another year or two.

 

[wilds]

Well half that because I went with the 8C/16T 1900X. It was a complete rebuild so the 1900X saved me some money and will give me an excuse to upgrade in another year or two.

8 cores to 32 cores using the same motherboard is an insane prospect!

 

[Paratus]

8 cores to 32 cores using the same motherboard is an insane prospect!

It’ll be pretty cool.

Interestingly when I compared the 1900X to my i7 920 @ 3.5Ghz it was about 3-3.5 times faster in multithreaded benchmarks and 60% faster per core performance.

 

[dark zero]

Besides being construction cores what about Carrizo was a disaster compared to say, Kaveri or Richland/Trinity? I'm not doubting your choice I'm just curious why Carrizo specifically?

Because Kaveri was the BEST Bulldozer of the bunch due the balanced GPU and L2 cache memory available.

Carrizo failed due the constrained L2 Cache, the awful desicion of doing the dynamic wattage consumption, allowing to put the best chips on constrained OEM designs (still, they are screwing people with the U tier of Intel and AMD).

Bristol Ridge was supposed to fix it, and they only did it on the laptop version. They became decent again.

 

[kwalkingcraze]

Any CPUs accidentally paired with one single-channel 4GB DDR4 2133 CAS 17 memory RAM stick. Yuck.... they run just as slow like any 2GB DDR3 due to extended CAS latency in DDR4. I am disappointed that I paid twice for DDR4 at half the performance of DDR3, similar to Pentium D experience again.

 

[Insert_Nickname]

Because Kaveri was the BEST Bulldozer of the bunch due the balanced GPU and L2 cache memory available.

Carrizo failed due the constrained L2 Cache, the awful desicion of doing the dynamic wattage consumption, allowing to put the best chips on constrained OEM designs (still, they are screwing people with the U tier of Intel and AMD).

Bristol Ridge was supposed to fix it, and they only did it on the laptop version. They became decent again.

I'm not sure I agree with you there. The thing is that Excavator performs the same as Steamroller despite having half the L2 cache, and what L2 cache there is massively improved. Excavator also features 2x more L1(D) cache. If you keep frequency under 3GHz Excavator is hellishly efficient.

The downside to Excavator is gaming. Pure and simple. Steamroller outperforms it clock for clock.

As a little side note, with DDR3 2133 memory, my Athlon 845 outperforms my older Richland 6800K w/DDR3 2400 despite a 600MHz frequency deficit. That's impressive in it's own right, and was what gave me some confidence that Zen wouldn't be bad.

Oh, if it wasn't obvious I'm looking from a desktop perspective. Mobile is a slightly different story. Mostly due to **** OEM implementations.

 

[mikeymikec]

Any custom processor made to order by/for OEMs for the sole purpose of duping customers.

IIRC I've seen two of these:

Acer getting an AMD Athlon II X2 290 which wasn't as good as the 280. (I can't remember if it lacked L2 or was clocked lower than the 280 or both)
HP getting a first gen Core i5 (I don't remember the exact model number) which was dual core rather than quad.

 

[happy medium]

as the other guy said, my pent 4 , 3.06 was a good CPU.
I think I had mine at 3.4 ghz.

Didn't Intel have a problem with a pent 3 CPU? 1.4 ghz version?
I cant remember the name of it.

 

[Markfw]

as the other guy said, my pent 4 , 3.06 was a good CPU.
I think I had mine at 3.4 ghz.

Didn't Intel have a problem with a pent 3 CPU? 1.4 ghz version?
I cant remember the name of it.

It was their first 1 ghz chip. They had to recall it.

 

[Abwx]

What was recalled was the 1.13 GHz P3 with 133 FSB, the 1GHz FSB 100 was working well but was inferior to a Duron 800 once the thing was slightly multitasking.

Edit : What was also recalled at the time was the infamous associated RD RAM i820 chipset, a total failure wich somewhat deserve the attribute "worse" more than any CPU produced those last 20 years...

 

[Markfw]

What was recalled was the 1.13 GHz P3 with 133 FSB, the 1GHz FSB 100 was working well but was inferior to a Duron 800 once the thing was slightly multitasking.

Edit : What was also recalled at the time was the infamous associated RD RAM i820 chipset, a total failure wich somewhat deserve the attribute "worse" more than any CPU produced those last 20 years...

Thank you for that correction, I forget about the 1 ghz vs 1.13 ghz

 

[Thunder 57]

Yeah back then 130W for a CPU was practically unheard of. Some perspective is needed though, I would estimate your TR to be probably ~30 times as powerful as a P4 Prescott in MT workloads... twice the IPC (rough guess) and 16 times the cores/thread... we've come a long way in 15 years, even though clockspeeds have barely budged.

Twice the IPC? That's it? P4 was hardly known for having high IPC. I would think Zen has twice the IPC of Core 2.