The Top 5 Worst CPUs of All Time @ [H]

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
 
Personally, I had nothing but problems with Cyrix processors :( I had one in the mid 90's (6x86) and could never get that system stable. It would lock up constantly. I finally ditched it for a P166 and had no issues after that. Granted it was an Amptron motherboard (anyone remember them??) so that may have had something to do with it.
 
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I had a DX4-100 that was faster than the 60/66MHz Pentium. I upgraded to a Pentium Pro 200 with a whole 2Megs of cache memory!!!!!
 
Followup honorable mention? Pentium 4.
Intel claimed it could scale up to 10 GHz but never came close. That original 438? socket was horrible. They addressed some stuff when they went to northwood but I remember very fondly the days of HUGELY expensive rambus ram, CPUs that suddenly required high end active cooling as the 2 GHz claimed a TDP of like 75 but realistically was drawing 100W.

At launch the 1.5 GHz version BARELY outperformed the 1GHz P3. Horrible.
 
Personally, I had nothing but problems with Cyrix processors :( I had one in the mid 90's (6x86) and could never get that system stable. It would lock up constantly. I finally ditched it for a P166 and had no issues after that. Granted it was an Amptron motherboard (anyone remember them??) so that may have had something to do with it.

My first pc had one of those p166 rated cyrix processors running at 133 mhz, lousy piece of crap that was, was coupled with an edge 3d GPU/sound combo card something or other, both of those got changed pretty quickly :p
 
Intel Pentium 60/66MHz (1993)? I paid more than two grand at our local, newly opened CompUSA for a Packard Bell equipped with that chip back in the day. It was so good that it convinced me to move away from Apple.

'Course, that was before I really knew what I was doing (sometimes I wonder if that's still the case).
 
I think it was the pentium 90mhz that used to ''melt'' the motherboard. my god it ran hot.

I think the PIV should have made the list. I mean it was crushed by AMD Duron running at much lower speeds.
 
The 2nd or 3rd PC that I ever built way back in April or May of 1993 was a Pentium 60. It was Spring and I remember it being rainy. I saved up an entire $450 dollars and drove from Topeka Kansas to Kansas City to shop a Telectronics. I was 24 or 25 years old. The motherboard, CPU and Memory cost me around $450 dollars. I think at the time I was using a Matrox Mystique 2Mb Video card.

Some of you old skool guys will remember the Matrox Mystique. At the time it was THE CARD to own. Then of course a few years later around 1996 you paired the Matrox with a Diamond Monster 3DFx Voodoo.

Also, let me put the 3DFx Voodoo into context ...... for the time ... it was fucking revolutionary. And even the word revolutionary doesn't do the card justice. At the time Quake was out but they released a special version of Quake called Quake GL. It was just simply incredible. I remember Telectronics had a demo setup with Quake GL running in demo mode and there was 15 to 20 guys standing around with their jaws on the floor including mine and it wasn't exactly a big store. For any tech head it was basically like us putting men on the moon. It was that amazing and then some.

Getting back to the Pentium 60. Yeah, it was a cool fun exciting memory for me. At the time I wasn't really into overclocking or benchmarks, that came a few years later.

Now Kyle, can we have the best CPU's list next? I can think of a few beauties. Ahhhh .... the sweet sweet dreams of going to bed at night dreaming of the morning when I can then wake up and play with my awesome Celeron 300A system.
 
Ahhhh .... the sweet sweet dreams of going to bed at night dreaming of the morning when I can then wake up and play with my awesome Celeron 300A system.

I had a PII SL2W8 at 450. That was a fun one. A friend of mine actually built a dual Celeron 300A system (Abit dual slot board) Plextor SCSI CDROM, Hercules GeForce 256 DDR, and I think a typical 9GB SCSI Barracuda or two into a cardboard box for bringing over to my LAN parties. :D It was completely insane. He precisely cut out every needed slot, mounted an ATX back-plane into it, so cards would slot in correctly, the CDROM was properly supported. (actually it was the Plextor Box that it was built into) I couldn't believe how solid it was for being a box. :D He'd open the flaps on the top, and inside was pure goodness. Played Q2, Q3A, Unreal, and UT wonderfully. (Those were the main games in rotation in the 98/99/00 timeframe I believe)
 
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Cyrix MediaGX was the worst CPU I have ever encountered. Built in graphics lagged horribly just drawing the Windows desktop. The CPU felt like a 486SX when you had it sitting next to a 233MHz Pentium MMX or 200Mhz Pentium Pro.
 
Aside from the fact that it was a fairly pioneering IC, the 8088 was pretty horrible. :D Especially when you had things based on a 1MHz 6510/6502 that could keep up pretty well in many tasks. (not everything, but...)

The 286 is where the PC started to get good, and then by the time the 386 was available things were moving along quite nicely.
 
The worst CPU I ever worked with was this piece of shit. Had one in a Fujitsu Lifebook.
crusoe_tm5800.jpg
 
Hehe fun memories... I think the the first pc I ever built from scratch was a k6-2 380, which the celeron 300A's would whop the shot out of ;) which brought me to HardOCP back in the day.
 
Missing CPUs that *I* think belong on this 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.
CPU that I think didn't belong on the list:
  • 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.
 
I feel sorry for Bulldozer.

They really weren't that bad. I still have my FX 8120 and 8320 chips in service. At stock speed you got 'good-enough' IPC for 1080p gaming and multi-threaded performance comparable to an i7 for less than the cost of an i5. They do run hot, I'll give you that, but I've never had such an easy or fun experience overclocking. The 8320 is still running at 4.8 GHz/1.45v all these years later.

Meanwhile my X79 setup shit the bed a year and a half after I built it...
 
Some of you old skool guys will remember the Matrox Mystique. At the time it was THE CARD to own. Then of course a few years later around 1996 you paired the Matrox with a Diamond Monster 3DFx Voodoo.

Also, let me put the 3DFx Voodoo into context ...... for the time ... it was fucking revolutionary. And even the word revolutionary doesn't do the card justice. At the time Quake was out but they released a special version of Quake called Quake GL. It was just simply incredible. I remember Telectronics had a demo setup with Quake GL running in demo mode and there was 15 to 20 guys standing around with their jaws on the floor including mine and it wasn't exactly a big store. For any tech head it was basically like us putting men on the moon. It was that amazing and then some.
I had the Matrox Millennium paired with a Diamond Monster, and at the time it was a huge game changer. Yup, I remember the graphics in QuakeGL being mind blowing. Also, that time period reminds of upgrading my gaming PC every year.
 
I had the Matrox Millennium paired with a Diamond Monster, and at the time it was a huge game changer. Yup, I remember the graphics in QuakeGL being mind blowing. Also, that time period reminds of upgrading my gaming PC every year.

I had a Millennium for a while too. Before I picked up the Voodoo and Riva, I briefly had a Mystique+M3D setup (grabbed the M3D on a whim while buying other hardware). It needed a patch to make pretty much any game work for it, because most supported glide instead, but for the games it actually worked in like Quake 2, it was pretty amazing. There were a few other games that it was fairly impressive in. However, I got the Canopus card soon after, and forgot all about it. :D The Riva was fun because you had to really tinker to get Open GL games looking just right. I remember tuning Quake 2's cfg file to look as good as it could on there, and comparing it back and forth between Riva and Voodoo.
 
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I'll tackle the Itanium...

Believe it or not, it was actually an excellent chip for a VERY limited market segment. At the time of Itanium's launch I was doing CFD (computational fluid dynamics) for a large company using desktop workstations. Cluster computing hadn't quite made a huge inroad into that market on a 'consumer' basis (through it had on the research side).

My previous box (at the time) was a HP workstation using a genuine HP engineered PA-RISC processor.
I was upgraded to an Itanium in 2001.
Both machines ran genuine HP-UX11 Unix.

After some initial bumps in the road with software compatibility, the IA-64 (Itanium) was a HUGE upgrade in terms of number crunching performance over the previous generation PA-RISC machine. I mean HUGE. I think we leased the machine for 18 or 24 months - and I was sad to see it go when its time came. Of course, by then the market had 'matured' and we moved onto clustering (like everyone else).

But my point stands: For VERY specific applications, Itanium was a monster. And therein lied the problem - Intel may as well have engineered that Itanium chip for just me, because seemingly nobody else in the world saw benefit from it. But Hell, I wasn't going to complain :)
 
Missing CPUs that *I* think belong on this 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.
CPU that I think didn't belong on the list:
  • 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.

I just realized that in the time it took me to write this, several other people had mentioned some of the exact same CPUs... I wasn't trying to rip off anyone's original thoughts, I just type slow! :-P
 
My AMD 5x86-133-PR75 was one of the better early x86 CPUs I owned. I had 8 MBs of RAM and VLB video and IO. I loved that machine, performance was excellent with pretty much everything I played. The people that didn't really like it were mostly those into the new 3D shooters that were starting to really use the FP unit on CPUs. Fortunately for me, I couldn't play most of those games anyway - FPS games make me (literally) sick, some worse than others. The stuff I played relied on the Integer units of these processors, and the AMD integer units (I had K6, K6-2 and K6-III CPUs as well) were superior to Intel's at almost every given clock speed all the way up through the Athon64 series of chips.

As for graphics cards... I absolutely loved my Matrox Millenium G400. I even had the MJPEG capture add-in board for it though I never really had a use for it. I remember that card actually being able to make crappy monitors look better, and the results on actual good monitors... well... :).
 
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I had the Matrox Millennium paired with a Diamond Monster, and at the time it was a huge game changer. Yup, I remember the graphics in QuakeGL being mind blowing. Also, that time period reminds of upgrading my gaming PC every year.

Getting off topic here, but I consider the Millenium II WRAM AGP in NT 4.0 the pinnacle of 2D cards. No tearing or flicker dragging around or resizing a window on a CRT. Just creamy smoothness. Paired with 2 Voodoo 2s in SLI for Quake II in NT was amazing until the G200 with its 32 bpp color came along, which blew me away. 2D wasn't as smooth feeling though.
 
Surprised nobody mentioned the Celerons that were based on the socket 423/socket 478 P4s- those were some miserable CPUs in terms of performance and features.
 
Pentium OverDrive PODP5V83 83mHz fit 486 socket data bus effectively reduced to 32-bit width 32 kB of level 1 cache $299 though I got mine for much less buying past the peak.

Couldn't use the faster cache mode (write through?) due to MB limitations.

Still better than my ' Make It 486 ' chip that upgraded 286 socket systems like my AST 286 10 mHz.

And that Evergreen upgrade what was that? Pentium based system and makes it a AMD K6-2 400 had one of those too.

 
Nice light hearted article. I actually agree with you on most points. Kudos Kyle!
 
The AMD K6 with 3DNow! was the worst processor I had to deal with. It had most blue screens of death and computer crashes I have ever seen. Constant integer divide by zero errors. I believed I figured that error out but by that time I had enough dealing with it and got rid of it after owning it for a month. I haven't touched AMD since then.
 
Just my opinion, but the early to mid 90's were the last years where Intel, AMD, Cyrix, etc. could effectively deceive consumers with blatant bullshit marketing. After consumers jumped on the internet bandwagon it was much easier to do research. Of course, a large percentage of consumers couldn't/can't be bothered with research.
 
Which one did they demo at CES decoding a dvd, using just a AA battery to power the cpu (the rest of the machine used a normal power supply)?
 
They really weren't that bad. I still have my FX 8120 and 8320 chips in service. At stock speed you got 'good-enough' IPC for 1080p gaming and multi-threaded performance comparable to an i7 for less than the cost of an i5. They do run hot, I'll give you that, but I've never had such an easy or fun experience overclocking. The 8320 is still running at 4.8 GHz/1.45v all these years later.

Meanwhile my X79 setup shit the bed a year and a half after I built it...[/QUOTE]
Had it existed in a vacuum, you are correct, however, it did not.
 
Doesn't that apply to any chip?
I would suggest no.

But please make your own list and post it here. :)

This is an EDITORIAL. You are arguing someone's subjective opinion, and we know how that goes. Shock, people have different opinions.
 
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