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The Worst CPUs Ever Made (2021)

extremetech.com

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Re: The Worst CPUs Ever Made (2021)

#81

Post by flyinghamster »

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…

I was also surprised the iAPX 432 wasn't on the list. It seems to be the Itanium's grandaddy. It was expensive, targeted to enterprises rather than everyone, tried to push the boundaries (32-bit for the 432, 64-bit for Itanium), and relied on VLIW instruction sets that were beyond the capabilities of compilers. The resemblance is striking.

As for Bulldozer, I was saddled with one for a while. Where it really fell down was (surprise!) its floating point performance. That FPU shared between two integer units makes for some "interesting" performance characteristics when trying to run multiple FP-heavy tasks, but overall, it was merely mediocre rather than terrible. I'm glad AMD hit it out of the park with Zen.

Re: The Worst CPUs Ever Made (2021)

#82

Post by pram »

louissan wrote: post #58

Anyone remember Pentium II and their new sockets cartridges? That didn't last long. Like what, one generation? Good. (saying that, but I remember purchasing a dual Pentium II motherboard for 2 400 MHz CPUs to speed up 3DStudio 4 renderings under Windows NT4... xD)

Pretty sure there was a slot Pentium 3.

I thought it was cool at the time, made me think of a NES cartridge.

Re: The Worst CPUs Ever Made (2021)

#83

Post by mardifoufs »

LargoLasskhyfv wrote: post #70
louissan wrote: post #58

Anyone remember Pentium II and their new sockets cartridges? That didn't last long. Like what, one generation? Good. (saying that, but I remember purchasing a dual Pentium II motherboard for 2 400 MHz CPUs to speed up 3DStudio 4 renderings under Windows NT4... xD)

Ze Fuji Quicksnap CPUs. (Single use analog pocket cameras)

Anymore details on those? I can't find any info on the CPUs inside

Re: The Worst CPUs Ever Made (2021)

#84

Post by user3939382 »

louissan wrote: post #58

Anyone remember Pentium II and their new sockets cartridges? That didn't last long. Like what, one generation? Good. (saying that, but I remember purchasing a dual Pentium II motherboard for 2 400 MHz CPUs to speed up 3DStudio 4 renderings under Windows NT4... xD)

It was called Slot 1. The first computer I built for myself used it, circa 2001.

Re: The Worst CPUs Ever Made (2021)

#85

Post by flyinghamster »

louissan wrote: post #58

Anyone remember Pentium II and their new sockets cartridges? That didn't last long. Like what, one generation? Good. (saying that, but I remember purchasing a dual Pentium II motherboard for 2 400 MHz CPUs to speed up 3DStudio 4 renderings under Windows NT4... xD)

There were Pentium IIIs in slot form as well - I encountered one at work many years ago. AMD also had a "Slot A" version of the original Athlon, which was quickly ditched.

Re: The Worst CPUs Ever Made (2021)

#86

Post by jcranmer »

cogman10 wrote: post #68
zamadatix wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure I'd say many compilers are even that great with SIMD these days and that is easier than what the itanium was asking of compilers. There are real gains to be had by using SIMD but it tends to be massively parallel data processing workloads with specially written SIMD code or even hand tuned assembly (image/video processing, neural networks) not just feeding in a source file and compiling with the SIMD fla…

The reverse is true. SIMD is harder because you have to have a uniform operation across a set of data. Imagine a for loop that looks like this int[] x, y, z; int[] p, d, q; for (int i = 0; i For SIMD, this is a complicated mess for the compiler to unravel. What the compiler would LIKE to do is turn this into 3 for loops and use the SIMD instructions to perform those operations in parallel. The itanium optimization, h…

That loop is actually nicely vectorizable, at least assuming that you replace int with float (there is no integer division vector instruction on x86).

All of the array accesses are uniform, so the resulting vector code is roughly:

  for (i = 0 .. size by vector width) {
    r0 = vector load x[i..i + vw]
    r1 = vector load y[i..i + vw]
    r2 = vector load z[i..i + vw]
    r3 = r0 / r2
    r4 = r2 * r0
    r5 = r1 + r2
    vector store r3 to p[i..i + vw]
    vector store r4 to d[i..i + vw]
    vector store r5 to q[i..i + vw]
  }
(and probably unroll the loop for good measure). No need to fission the loop to vectorize here.

Re: The Worst CPUs Ever Made (2021)

#87

Post by pram »

sidewndr46 wrote: post #17
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.

For us non Apple users, how is that possible? I don't think I've ever had a CPU die other than by lightning.

The processor in a G5 PowerMac came on a card that had the VRMs, capacitors, and a bunch of other stuff on it. It was basically like a tiny motherboard that attached to your motherboard.

Re: The Worst CPUs Ever Made (2021)

#88

Post by StillBored »

paulmd wrote: post #76
tsss wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bulldozer gets too much hate IMO. Okay, the instructions per clock cycle were bad and power consumption was high but you can't forget that the FX-6300 was $100 for a >3-core chip that could be overclocked by another 0.7 GHz without issue. The price-performance ratio was better than anything Intel fielded. I'm still running it today.

price-to-performance is the last resort of a company that has failed at taking the performance crown. Nobody cuts prices more than they have to , but everyone adjusts prices to where they need to go to sell the product. Bulldozer was priced low because it was genuine garbage, it was actually slower than Phenom in a lot of cases (which blows the "it was about price to peformance!" thing out of the water - nobody regre…

But as a consumer, all I really care about is price/perf (and maybe power and a few other variables). Far to much of the tech industry runs around talking about how great the top dog (this week) is because they bin, push the engineering margins and sell some golden chip that ends up being .0000001% of their product line for some crazy $$$$$.

During the early part of the bulldozer timeframe AMD could provide a competitive part of much of intel's lineup at a lesser cost. It was only at the end were they kept falling farther and farther behind that it was a problem. For a few years there, you could actually _SEE_ in intels pricing where AMD's top part was because there would be a bunch of parts all clustered below some number (say $200) and then there would be a big price jump between every part above that line.

And so AMD had a real problem when you went into the $RETAILER looking at a $600 laptop because while their laptop might have been better than the similarly priced intel, what you would hear is "amd sucks" and so people would actually pick the inferior product.

Re: The Worst CPUs Ever Made (2021)

#89

Post by causality0 »

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…

Yes, and no mention of the Transmeta Crusoe either.

Re: The Worst CPUs Ever Made (2021)

#90

Post by rondrabkin »

OK then, I was very heavily involved in both the item in the Intro (the flaw in the first Pentium, I was the production control guy in the sole source factory) and #1 on the list (Itanium, I was trying to get hardware companies to work with their software suppliers to port to the new architecture using a very significant budget).

The common thread was Intel marketing pushing something that was a dog for marketing reasons

1. It is very amazing not in a good way when you think you have enough inventory but someone from HQ calls up the warehouse and has the older CPUs crushed by a bulldozer (you don't want to throw them out, they are quite usable)

2. Was amazing that sucker ran so hot tech support got a call about test boxes catching on fire

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