The Worst CPUs Ever Made (2021) • Hacker News Board

Re: The Worst CPUs Ever Made (2021)

#21

Post by als0 » Thu, May 19, 2022, 9:21 PM UTC

SeanLuke wrote: post #10

What does "worst CPU" mean? I think that it means, regardless of market success, the CPU that most hindered, indeed retarded, progress in CPU engineering history. In this regard, #1 and #2 are clearly the 8088 and 80286 respectively.

Agreed. I think Itanium gets a lot of unnecessary slack. It really tried some exciting new ideas and clean concepts. Not all of those concepts were much of a win, but with the first chip arriving years late then there’s no wonder it was perceived as underwhelming from the get go (that would happen to any chip that’s late)

Re: The Worst CPUs Ever Made (2021)

#22

Post by jandrese » Thu, May 19, 2022, 9:21 PM UTC

mrintellectual wrote: post #3

velcrovan wrote: post #2

CTRL+F "transmeta crusoe": Not found ah well

My vote for worst CPU goes to the iAPX 432 (also not on this list).

Wow, a garbage collector implemented inside of the processor. Chip level support for objects. You can't fault Intel for their ambition here, just their common sense.

And the whole thing is built for a world where everybody is writing code in Ada. I bet some compiler makers were salivating at the prospect of collecting all of those huge license fees from developers.

Re: The Worst CPUs Ever Made (2021)

#23

Post by sidewndr46 » Thu, May 19, 2022, 9:22 PM UTC

josteink wrote: post #15

xbar wrote: post #7

I'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.

I owned a Pentium 4 as well (oh boy did I save for a long time as a teenager to afford that). It wasn't really as bad as what this article claims. On the other hand, the dual-core parts probably really are that bad.

Re: The Worst CPUs Ever Made (2021)

#24

Post by jandrese » Thu, May 19, 2022, 9:23 PM UTC

masklinn wrote: post #5

The lack of Alpha seems odd, though maybe that should be the worst ISA rather than merely individual CPU?

My impression is that Alpha's ISA was mostly fine except for the power draw, DEC just didn't have the R&D budget to keep up with Intel and all of the foundries and had their lunch eaten by x86 just like every other chip designer in the 80s and 90s.

Re: The Worst CPUs Ever Made (2021)

#25

Post by notacoward » Thu, May 19, 2022, 9:23 PM UTC

hajile wrote: post #9

This 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…

At least the 960 was somewhat usable. Many variants were created, and several were widely used in embedded products for quite a few years. The 860, however, was Just Crap. Full stop. End of story. IIRC it had weird double-instruction modes that compilers just couldn't handle, and if you used them anyway (for very necessary performance) then handling exceptions properly was all but impossible. Definitely gets my vote for worst ever.

Re: The Worst CPUs Ever Made (2021)

#26

Post by sidewndr46 » Thu, May 19, 2022, 9:24 PM UTC

kzrdude wrote: post #19

sidewndr46 wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Oh no, the last time this happened there were definitely other casualties. The motherboard was left in a particular state of undeath, where it wouldn't quite power on. But if you jumped the ATX header it'd sort of attempt to boot and give some beeps.

After that I added a bunch of grounding to my house and I haven't had that much damage in one lightning strike before.

Re: The Worst CPUs Ever Made (2021)

#27

Post by hajile » Thu, May 19, 2022, 9:24 PM UTC

velcrovan wrote: post #2

CTRL+F "transmeta crusoe": Not found ah well

I think transmeta was MUCH better than Itanium.

Itanium held the idea that we could accurately predict ILP at compile time (when the halting problem clearly states that we cannot).

Transmeta said VLIW has the best theoretical PPA possible, so let's wrap that in a large, programmable JIT to analyze/optimize stuff to take advantage.

Modern CPUs run quite a bit closer to transmeta, but they largely use fixed-function hardware rather than being able to improve performance at a later time.

If we could nail down that ideal VLIW architecture, we could sell a given chip at various process sizes and then offer various paid "software" upgrades or compatibility packs for various ISAs to run legacy code.

At least there's a pipe dream worth looking into.

Re: The Worst CPUs Ever Made (2021)

#28

Post by jandrese » Thu, May 19, 2022, 9:25 PM UTC

sidewndr46 wrote: post #23

josteink wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I owned a Pentium 4 as well (oh boy did I save for a long time as a teenager to afford that). It wasn't really as bad as what this article claims. On the other hand, the dual-core parts probably really are that bad.

The article did call out in particular the late generation P4s with the super duper extra long pipeline that simply couldn't keep themselves fed when working with anything but synthetic benchmarks.

Re: The Worst CPUs Ever Made (2021)

#29

Post by easytiger » Thu, May 19, 2022, 9:25 PM UTC

My first PC had a cyrix 333Mhz CPU. Ran just fine! But I was learning c in Borland turbo c and djgpp so it didn't have to do much. Running java on it... Well that wasn't fun with the 32MB RAM.

Worked on itanium too. It was more amazing Microsoft actually had support for it.

Re: The Worst CPUs Ever Made (2021)

#30

Post by protomyth » Thu, May 19, 2022, 9:26 PM UTC

tangental wrote: post #14

I 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.

If I remember correctly it didn't have the biendian capability of the G4 so Virtual PC wouldn't run.