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The Worst CPUs Ever Made (2021)

extremetech.com

131–140 of 155 posts

Re: The Worst CPUs Ever Made (2021)

#131
post #107

Earlier 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 only two architectural questions that I know of were... The weak memory model: https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20170817-00/?p=96... Inability to address low-power designs: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/StrongARM "According to Allen Baum, the StrongARM traces its history to attempts to make a low-power version of the DEC Alpha, which DEC's engineers quickly concluded was not possible." The other major…

And incapable of working with unaligned values or values smaller than 4 bytes. Weren’t there also cache coherence issues?

Alpha kinda had you finish the hardware in software.

Re: The Worst CPUs Ever Made (2021)

#132
post #21

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)

Also was very amusing when we shipped test boxes...that sucker ran really hot, and I got one call about the Itanium box asking for tech support help and the report was that the box was on fire.

Re: The Worst CPUs Ever Made (2021)

#133
post #7

I'm so ashamed to have owned a Cyrix, a P4, and an AMD Bulldozer. They were all awful.

I had two Bulldozers. Bulldozer wasn't competitive at the top end, but I always found Athlon chips to be cheaper than their performance equivalent Intel part. So the fastest AMD chip would be cheaper than the third fastest Intel part. Still a good value. Terrible for AMD's bottom-line though.

Fair enough. I feel like I got decent value out of my Athlon. At the time, it sure seemed like a gross power hog. I suspect I would be shocked by its modest TDP if I went and looked back at specs.

Re: The Worst CPUs Ever Made (2021)

#134
Of course, what constitutes "worst" is a difficult question.

Signetics made the 2650, a nice processor with a highly regular architecture with a condition code register. After every arithmetic operation including loads and stores the ALU updated the condition code register.

The National 32032 processor was a wonderful part with a clarity of design that made it a great choice for a workhorse processor. Unix running the machine was stable and efficient except that every few weeks there would be disastrous crash. With a tremendous amount of effort the source of the problem was found: a race condition in the interrupt control logic that returned from the wrong stack and scribbled over memory.

The Intel i860 exposed the internal computational pipeline to the programmer. Context switching was complicated by the conflict of real-time operating performance requirements and a deep pipeline with no way to grab the context and drain the pipeline. Eventually a dedicated team got a Unix OS running on the part, but it peformed poorly.

The Maspar MP-1 was a SIMD machine. It was cool to test new library functions by seeing if, say, sqrt(x)*sqrt(x)==x for all floating point numbers. Customers wanted the Maspar machine to be timeshared, but the architecture made it difficult to do since the CPU state was very large and memory was not mapped.

Intel's 8048 (and simplified versions like the 8021 and enhanced versions like the 8051) did not perform as well in terms of speed or code size as many of the competing micro controllers. The competition offered very simple asymmetric complex architectures which could be programmed (possibly with external hardware assists) to accomplish embedded tasks with significant effort and several days or weeks of effort. The Intel part was not quite as efficient in memory use and speed, but could be programmed in an afternoon. And another engineer/programmer could look at the code and understand it without much deep thought.

The Motorola 68000 was a wonderful machine with a clear instruction set. But the original 68000 could not support virtual memory.

There have been all sorts of different architectures tried which seen strange today but came about because the architecture was thought to provide an engineering solution to an immediate problem. There was a time when register machines were thought to be a bad architecture, far inferior to a simple stack architecture.

Re: The Worst CPUs Ever Made (2021)

#135
post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's an enthralling tale, but perhaps you could share why you feel it deserved praise-singing to begin with, and also what titles you worked on, considering many developers were complaining about it when it was current console architecture, and you don't even need to do much of a Google Search to find people bitching about it.

>Google Search to find people bitching about it. Seriously? You can find people bitching about anything on Google Search. The fact is most people just weren't prepared for multi-core data oriented programming in 2006. List my titles: no you first

> List my titles: no you first

One of the cardinal rules of argumentation is that the burden of proof is upon the person making the claim.

You've made it. Now back it up.

Re: The Worst CPUs Ever Made (2021)

#136

"Note: 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." The fact that the fault was tiny and that few people were affected is definatly NOT the point. The so-called Pentium 'bug' was the result of fundamentally terrible engineering on Intel's part in that the unde…

> In order to achieve increased math processing speed, Intel broke mathematics algorithms down into part algorithm and part lookup tables - that is instead of having mathematics algorithms complete the whole task (which is the logical way of doing things).

This is nonsense. There's no functional difference between "lookup table" and "algorithm" (whatever that means) when it comes to a circuit design. Both are perfectly valid ways, nothing inherently wrong with either.

Re: The Worst CPUs Ever Made (2021)

#137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No IDT WinChip though, that's mildly surprising

I don't think the Winchip was that well known. But it never pretended to be a high performing design.

The list includes the MediaGX, so I thought it might be comparable in popularity/performance expectations.

To be honest, I remember the WinChip because I thought the printed Windows logo on the CPU was pretty cool. Texas and AMD also had the "designed for Windows 95" logo on some of their CPUs (some 486 and Overdrive designs, iirc)

Re: The Worst CPUs Ever Made (2021)

#138

"Note: 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." The fact that the fault was tiny and that few people were affected is definatly NOT the point. The so-called Pentium 'bug' was the result of fundamentally terrible engineering on Intel's part in that the unde…

> In order to achieve increased math processing speed, Intel broke mathematics algorithms down into part algorithm and part lookup tables - that is instead of having mathematics algorithms complete the whole task (which is the logical way of doing things). Can you expand on this? I thought all FPUs used lookup tables? Even the 8087 had them.

I think fpus still do for things like trig functions. Doing it using a power series potentially gives bad results and takes a long time to get enough accuracy. I think it was pretty common to use lookup tables in various algorithms back then since it was way faster to do a memory access and then some interpolation or just a memory access than to do a bunch of calculations.

Re: The Worst CPUs Ever Made (2021)

#139
post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Google Search to find people bitching about it. Seriously? You can find people bitching about anything on Google Search. The fact is most people just weren't prepared for multi-core data oriented programming in 2006. List my titles: no you first

> List my titles: no you first One of the cardinal rules of argumentation is that the burden of proof is upon the person making the claim. You've made it. Now back it up.

I guess you must have been on a college debate team.

Re: The Worst CPUs Ever Made (2021)

#140
post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Haha! I've spent months tuning code to run on the Cell, and I despise that thing. Sony gave you 6 of the 8 SPE cores to use (I think they reserved two, but it's been ages). They are indeed very fast, however, they have no cache coherent access to main RAM and only 256k of memory for each element. So, you have to meticulously write DMA scheduling code to keep them fed. If you're a simpleton like me, you double buffer…

In the early years, the SPUs were not all functional due to the fabbing process. The ones that had all 8 functional ended up in servers, and the ones with about 6 ended up in PS3s. This still happens all the time with clock speeds, and core counts on modern processors today. I’m sure the fabrication process improved over time, but they disabled the 2 cores to maintain backwards compatibility. Unrelated: Every time I’…

I still have a launch-edition PS3 on firmware 1.01 that I got on launch day (wife and I were fortunate enough to be able to buy two and stash one). I've lost all kinds of stuff in moves and etc. since, but that thing will have to be pried from my cold dead hands.
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