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ExtremeTech has assembled a list of the worst CPUs ever – that is, processors that were not only poorly positioned or slower than expected, but fundamentally broken. These include Intel’s Itanium, which was meant to replace x86 but ultimately limped along due to incompatibilities, AMD’s power-hungry Bulldozer, which failed to meet performance expectations, and Sony’s Cell Broadband Engine, which was only “phenomenally good in theory.”
Plenty of people will bring up the Pentium FDIV bug here, but the reason we didn’t include it is simple: Despite being an enormous marketing failure for Intel and a huge expense, the actual bug was tiny. It impacted no one who wasn’t already doing scientific computing and the scale and scope of the problem in technical terms was never estimated to be much of anything.
Plenty of people will bring up the Pentium FDIV bug here, but the reason we didn’t include it is simple: Despite being an enormous marketing failure for Intel and a huge expense, the actual bug was tiny. It impacted no one who wasn’t already doing scientific computing and the scale and scope of the problem in technical terms was never estimated to be much of anything.