CTRL+F "transmeta crusoe": Not found ah well
Oh those were the days were I was young and naive and I thought Linus was going to change the world (again) blurring the lines between 'software' and 'hardware'
The Worst CPUs Ever Made (2021)
11–20 of 155 posts
Re: The Worst CPUs Ever Made (2021)
#12This doesn't seem to be the best-researched article out there. If they thought Itanium was bad, they should have looked into the i860. Itanium was an attempt to fix a bunch of the i860 ideas. i860 quickly went from a supercomputer chip to a cheap DSP alternative (where it had at least the hope of hitting more than 10% of its theoretical performance). Intel iAPX 432 was preached as the second coming back in the 80s, b…
> The i960 was take 2 and their joint venture called BiiN also shuttered.
I have an old X-11 terminal I believe has a i960 in it. I’m shocked that thing was capable of running CDE desktops when it stutters on FVWM over a network much faster than it ever was intended to see.
Re: The Worst CPUs Ever Made (2021)
#13The lack of Alpha seems odd, though maybe that should be the worst ISA rather than merely individual CPU?
x86, SPARC, Cell, EPIC, iAPX, i860, and even contemporary ARM versions are worse. If we reach into lesser-known ISAs or older ISAs, we could add a TON more to that list.
Re: The Worst CPUs Ever Made (2021)
#14I visted this page hoping to see the PowerPC 970 top of the list, but all it gets is a "Dishonorable Mention". After going through three PowerMac G5s, all of which had their processors die within 4 years, I still bear a grudge.
Re: The Worst CPUs Ever Made (2021)
#15I'm so ashamed to have owned a Cyrix, a P4, and an AMD Bulldozer. They were all awful.
I’ve had a P4 and I didn’t consider it “awful”.
It was without a doubt the fastest CPU I had ever had at the time, but boy did it generate heat and need cooling.
That machine sounded like a always on vacuum-cleaner.
Re: The Worst CPUs Ever Made (2021)
#16The lack of Alpha seems odd, though maybe that should be the worst ISA rather than merely individual CPU?
Why would Alpha be the worst? I’ve owned 2 of them, 21064 and 21264, and they were fast and reliable.
The influence of Alpha on modern instruction sets like ARM64 and RISC-V is tremendous. It’s just sad it had to die for this to happen.
Re: The Worst CPUs Ever Made (2021)
#17I visted this page hoping to see the PowerPC 970 top of the list, but all it gets is a "Dishonorable Mention". After going through three PowerMac G5s, all of which had their processors die within 4 years, I still bear a grudge.
For us non Apple users, how is that possible? I don't think I've ever had a CPU die other than by lightning.
Re: The Worst CPUs Ever Made (2021)
#18CTRL+F "transmeta crusoe": Not found ah well
My vote for worst CPU goes to the iAPX 432 (also not on this list).
I was looking for this as well. It should be on there for introducing a completely new architecture, costing more, and underperforming contemporary products from Intel's catalog.
Re: The Worst CPUs Ever Made (2021)
#19I visted this page hoping to see the PowerPC 970 top of the list, but all it gets is a "Dishonorable Mention". After going through three PowerMac G5s, all of which had their processors die within 4 years, I still bear a grudge.
For us non Apple users, how is that possible? I don't think I've ever had a CPU die other than by lightning.
I was imagining lightning struck the cpu specifically, leaving the rest intact? Quite the precision.
Re: The Worst CPUs Ever Made (2021)
#20Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why would Alpha be the worst? I’ve owned 2 of them, 21064 and 21264, and they were fast and reliable.
The influence of Alpha on modern instruction sets like ARM64 and RISC-V is tremendous. It’s just sad it had to die for this to happen.
I'd also add that a lot of excellent ex-Alpha engineers (e.g. Jim Keller, Dan Dobberpuhl off the top of my head) ended up designing great chips at other companies.