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

Re: The Worst CPUs Ever Made (2021)

#151

Post by npunt » Sat, May 21, 2022, 1:51 AM UTC

scrlk wrote: post #51

A different twist on the Itanium: technically bad but ended up as a strategic win for Intel. SGI, Compaq and HP mothballed development of their own CPUs (MIPS/Alpha/PA-RISC) as they all settled on Itanium for future products. After Itanium turned out to be a flop, those companies adopted x86-64 - Intel killed off 3 competing ISAs by shipping a bad product.

Itanium was the OS/2 of chips, Microsoft used OS/2 to get IBM chasing a dead end while they baked Windows NT & 95 until their lead was secured.

Re: The Worst CPUs Ever Made (2021)

#152

Post by djmips » Sat, May 21, 2022, 3:13 AM UTC

jsjohnst wrote: post #141

djmips wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Every single one of them came out a better coder. They might have been dragged kicking and screaming to the multi-core but they would've had to get there in the end.

> Every single one of them came out a better coder. Sure that may be true, but that does not mean they are singing its praises either. Just look at this very post on HN where folks who’ve written code for it have commented on the experience, how many would you say are: - singing its praises (you) - cursing it under their breath while saying it had its benefits (few) - full throated rant about how bad the experience w…

IDK - I guess most experienced low level coders hate computers, it doesn't matter what the CPU. People are lazy. I understand that it was hard but it doesn't make it a WORST CPU EVER MADE

Re: The Worst CPUs Ever Made (2021)

#153

Post by velcrovan » Sat, May 21, 2022, 3:10 PM UTC

pengaru wrote: post #112

velcrovan wrote: post #2

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

I had a Transmeta Crusoe based PC104 SBC and for the time it was relatively quick for something low power, does it really deserve to be in the "worst cpus ever" list? why for?

You’re right. I was kind of being snarky. But it was a huge disappointment compared against the promises from Transmeta and the tech journalism of the time.

Re: The Worst CPUs Ever Made (2021)

#154

Post by hilbert42 » Wed, May 25, 2022, 12:45 PM UTC

tadfisher wrote: post #127

hilbert42 wrote: post #113

"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…

This is a bit hyperbolic. Intel implemented a known and popular algorithm (SRT [1]) with a standard LUT for the bit patterns expected in IEEE754 FP numbers. They were not the first, last, or only microprocessor design firm to do so. A fault in a script that copied the LUT values to the machines that program the PLAs as part of the manufacturing process led to 5 missing values in the LUT (set to 0), out of 1066 entrie…

Hyperbolic or otherwise, it happened and I remember it well (it changed my purchasing decisions at the time).

I'm aware of most of those details as I took a keen interest in the matter at the time. I'm also aware of the argument for the use of said algorithm.

Whether one adopts this approach or not is philosophical argument and I just happen to believe it's bad (and ugly) engineering - and in this case witnes the outcome, it cost Intel dearly in both monetary and PR terms.

Re: The Worst CPUs Ever Made (2021)

#155

Post by hilbert42 » Mon, May 30, 2022, 10:22 AM UTC

drivebycomment wrote: post #136

hilbert42 wrote: post #113

"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 perfect…

See links in tadfisher's reply, they provide a summary. (My comment was simplified for the HN post, his links provide a comprehensive description).