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Had a customer bring in a Toshiba laptop running a AMD E1 CPU a couple of years ago. Said it was 'a bit slow'.
Holy....shit. It was bad. Hardly had the horsepower to boot. It ran at 95-100% CPU even at idle all the time. Just no power at all.
Anything VIA (applies to their CPUs, chipsets, "graphics" adapters, ...really anything they touch) - Do you hate stability? performance? compatibility? driver updates? future OS support? sanity?! VIA is there to help!!!Missing CPUs that *I* think belong on this list:
CPU that I think didn't belong on the list:
- Intel P4 Willamette - Very hot, power hungry, slower than PIII, socket 423 was replaced after barely a year (no upgrade path!), Initially required crazy expensive and effectively slow RAMBUS, support for old PC133 added later while AMD was already on DDR.
- AMD Am5x86 - You thought the K5 was bad? Cute... AMD tried to pass this off as a Pentium competitor, it was no coincidence that it used a 486 chipset and socket. We had one of these that ran at 133mhz, AMD was honest-ish by giving it a PR score BELOW its actual MHz speed! The 133mhz part was rated at "PR75". In reality it was about half the speed of a P75 for any floating point, which more and more programs had started to use. Also, since it was 486 based almost all compatible motherboards were limited to ISA (no PCI).
- Transmeta Crusoe - most people have never even heard of these, they were ultra-low power CPUs used in a handful of laptops (like the tiny Sony VAIO PCG series. Unfortunately they were also ultra-low performance. It wasn't an actual x86 CPU, but instead used "code morphing software" to translate x86 instructions to it's own VLIW architecture. The designers intended to be able to "upgrade" the CPU by updating the firmware (aka code morphing software) but this never came to be. It was great in theory, but it just couldn't keep up with even the lowest end AMD and Intel CPUs of the time.
- Anything VIA (applies to their CPUs, chipsets, "graphics" adapters, ...really anything they touch) - Do you hate stability? performance? compatibility? driver updates? future OS support? sanity?! VIA is there to help!!!
- Cyrix MediaGX - To the guy that said the Geode was bad, the Geode was an EVOLUTION of this piece of garbage! Another fake "Pentium", this chip was actually a 486 in drag. To make things worse, everything was integrated into the core (graphics, sound, memory controller and PCI controller). Sure it was low power, but the performance was astonishingly bad, partially thanks to having no L2 cache. Since everything was integrated on the CPU, the only option was embedded.
- AMD Bulldozer - Was it great? No. Was it good? ...well, no, not really, but was it decent for the price it was sold at? absolutely! This chip allowed for some very decent gaming systems for dirt cheap.
Never touched an AMD Geode, but I really feel like this NVIDIA Tegra 4 is hamstringing my Wacom Cintiq Companion Hybrid in ways beyond a lack of updates beyond Android 4.2.1 Jelly Bean.Have you ever tried to use a Geode? Give it a whir and I think you'll be willing to knock Bulldozer down a few pegs. BD couldn't keep up in games but it least it was pretty solid for a budget rig.
Or the NVidia Tegra in the Surface RT. I dare say the early NV CPUs make R600 and Vega look like stellar products. Checking for WIndows updates takes *days* and that is not an exaggeration
Oh god, I remember hearing about these! The Compaq TC1000 Tablet PC (a "hybrid" slate with a cool detachable keyboard and docking station that today's hybrids should consider shamelessly ripping off) used a Transmeta Crusoe and a FinePoint pen digitizer, and they hamstrung what was otherwise a really ahead-of-its-time design.Transmeta Crusoe - most people have never even heard of these, they were ultra-low power CPUs used in a handful of laptops (like the tiny Sony VAIO PCG series. Unfortunately they were also ultra-low performance. It wasn't an actual x86 CPU, but instead used "code morphing software" to translate x86 instructions to it's own VLIW architecture. The designers intended to be able to "upgrade" the CPU by updating the firmware (aka code morphing software) but this never came to be. It was great in theory, but it just couldn't keep up with even the lowest end AMD and Intel CPUs of the time.
Maybe we can work something out there; I've got a BP6, dual Celeron 533s and at least 512 MB of SDRAM boxed up in storage, and the last time I gave it a run, it worked. Capacitors showed no apparent signs of failure.One day I will own an Abit BP6.
Maybe we can work something out there; I've got a BP6, dual Celeron 533s and at least 512 MB of SDRAM boxed up in storage, and the last time I gave it a run, it worked. Capacitors showed no apparent signs of failure.
Didn't IBM have a 486 SLC2 66 as well? I actually had one of those and it sucked compared to my old AMD 386 DX40.There was no comparison, a Pentium was much faster than a 486 per clock. The only thing that helped is that some 486's ran at 100MHz or more. Even then, the Pentium would blow them away at anything involving the FPU. Quake is an example of this. The Cyrix 486 chips sucked ass. My Cyrix 486 DX2-80MHz was slower than an Intel 486 DX2-66MHz CPU. AMD was a little better in this area, but not by much. Intel was king in the 486 era. AMD's 486 DX4 100 and DX4 133MHz are well regarded, but you were effectively stuck with a 486's platform and they still were only barely competitive with early Pentium processors.
Man. I still have some HP Integrity Servers packing Itainums in production. They just won't die. They are still fast. They Rock!
The Itanium was good at specific tasks. I didn't list the Itanium over raw performance, but rather it's lack of versatility and market penetration.
K6-2’s and 3’s. I’ve never seen a system using either of those processors that was 100% stable.
One of my retro PC's was running a k6-2 450 for a while and I ended up swapping it out for p3 450. The stability just wasn't there. Opening certain apps would just crash the system. It was weird.
K6-2’s and 3’s. I’ve never seen a system using either of those processors that was 100% stable.
K6-2’s and 3’s. I’ve never seen a system using either of those processors that was 100% stable.
The issue with these wasn't the processor - it was the chipset. Often these were paired with via or ali chipsets which, quite frankly, were full of bugs
Yup. Very similar experiences from me too.
Me and a friend built 2 Systems at the same time. He went with a K6-2 450 and I went with a Celeron 433 on a 440BX. His ran unstable and mine over locked to 590mhz 24x7 stable. I chose wisely.
He had me kinda beat on GPU though. I had a TNT2 Ultra and he had an ATI Rage Fury Maxx.
I had a K6-2 450 system on an Epox board using a via chipset (from memory) The system was fast, but it was buggy as all get out
I swore off via at that point, which lead to me having an athlon 600 on an irongate chipset, and a dual athlon 1200MP setup on a tyan thunder k7 board - absolutely refused to have via during those generations.
The MAXX’s were awesome! But largely were held back by the fact they were dual chip designs and the ATI driver team was complete horse shit back then.I had never heard of the MAXX before. Found some benchmarks on toms hardware and wow, that thing was pretty snazzy. Above a 256mb SDR Geforce but short of the DDR one. Higher than the voodoo3 3500 and the tnt2 ultra.
I suppose it depends on your definition of worst - worst in terms of market placement/performance? worst in terms of engineering? worst in terms of support? buggiest?
Hey thanks - I could talk about chips architectures and personalities all day and night, it's kinda something that I have an interest in - should have studied CE ....Good question. I'm just impressed that someone remembers those chips and their "personalities".
Mucho props to you man.
K6-2’s and 3’s. I’ve never seen a system using either of those processors that was 100% stable.
The issue with these wasn't the processor - it was the chipset. Often these were paired with via chipsets which, quite frankly, were full of bugs. ALI chipsets weren't that much better, but they worked.
So, wait - there's boards that make that PC-Chips M598 with its SiS 530, WTF-inducing header layout (who the hell puts AT port headers between expansion card slots?) and apparent inability to run 100 MHz FSB with any stability whatsoever that I had to suffer with as a kid whose father built this for him not look like a total piece of shit by comparison? Cripes... I know there's a lot of retro hardware people want to salvage, but there was nothing about that system that warranted salvation from a recycler save nostalgia, which wasn't strong enough for my liking.That was largely due to the shitty Super-7 motherboards. They were often based on VIA and SIS chipsets which weren't worth a shit. They had cut rate electrical implementations and horrendous BIOS support. The FIC VA503+ stands out as one of, if not the worst motherboard of all time and many a K6 sat on top of it.
At least things turned out better for AMD going into the Athlon age and nVidia's nForce chipsets. Remember when those were good, especially nForce2 with SoundStorm?
Missing from the list is the 286 (intel/AMD) - The 286 actually has protected mode. The problem is that in order to do a switch out to protected mode you
Cripes, you really had it bad... there was a system I had with an Asus A7N8X-E Deluxe for a brief while that worked more or less fine, though, barring a certain set of RAM that needed a modded BIOS to set command rate 2T on the RAM in order to remain stable. Two 1 GB DDR-400 DIMMs, to be specific.Obviously you never tried to run a real soundblaster on one! - They had issues running anything that was slightly out of spec, and the drivers weren't updated regularly enough - which meant that the sound was perpetually glitchy. One particular MSI board (which was called one of the best) had overheating issues, and the heatsink on the chipset had really poor thermal paste. In the case of my dad's pc it nuked one of the memory slots as a result of an overheat, and literally left burn marks on the board ...
"Hey dad, what's that burning smell?"
The protected mode was just a checkbox. .
Cripes, you really had it bad... there was a system I had with an Asus A7N8X-E Deluxe for a brief while that worked more or less fine, though, barring a certain set of RAM that needed a modded BIOS to set command rate 2T on the RAM in order to remain stable. Two 1 GB DDR-400 DIMMs, to be specific.
Needless to say, it didn't kill any components from overheating - not that I ever pushed it as hard as I would have if it were my best board, but it was literally a freebie given to me around the time I was building up my Q6600 system a decade ago.
That said, my Sound Blaster cards went to other systems; my Q6600 box ran an Auzentech X-Fi Prelude, Auzentech X-Fi Forte and Creative X-Fi Titanium HD in that order. Let's just say I'm fully aware of the driver jank along the way, and despite that, I still keep the X-Fi Titanium HD in my 4770K build because I do actually have a use for hardware OpenAL and ALchemy. I also had a Sound Blaster Live! Value as a holdover from the K6-2 350 system, but that thing was showing its age at the time and wouldn't be of much use at this point unless someone really wants to use kX Project drivers.
First - Do not yell at me.
Second - Protected mode is the foundation of all modern computing. It fundamentally underpins multitasking in all x86/64 operating systems. If you think it was "just a checkbox" then maybe you think vector instructions are just a checkbox too
First - Do not yell at me.
Second - Protected mode is the foundation of all modern computing. It fundamentally underpins multitasking in all x86/64 operating systems. If you think it was "just a checkbox" then maybe you think vector instructions are just a checkbox too