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Discussion (25 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews
This sentence threw me a little bit. Which mainframes were based on the Z80? I'd love to know more about that.
0. https://www.ebay.ie/itm/206496219323
Why I have not picked one up yet… I think I just have a sweet spot for the 6502 and keep putting together KIM-1 kits.
(EDIT: Finally after years, I just pulled the trigger on their Classic II kit.)
The ISA is quite messy because of the backward compatibility requirement with the Intel 8080 (e.g. the Z80 had to fill undocumented gaps in the 8080 opcode encoding map with new instructions, four of which were prefix instructions to unlock additional instruction 'subsets' (DD/FD for replacing instructions involving the HL register pair with indexed addressing modes via the IX/IY registers, and ED/CB prefixes for adding two entirely new opcode blocks).
If the Zilog engineers would have been free to design their own ISA I'm sure they would have been able to come up with a much more elegant design.
Also the Z80 had more than twice as many transistors as the 6502 (8500 for the Z80 vs 3500 for 6502).
I still prefer programming the Z80 over the 6502 though :)
My 5090 has 92 billion transistors (I dont say they dont bring fun)
an Apple M5 Max is 100,000,000,000 transistors (ok it’s 18 CPU + 40 GPU cores) by comparison so 17 million 8080 equivalents
At, ballpark, 1000 times the clock frequency. It’s a pity we do not how to connect such a large number of tiny cores in a way so that it can perform meaningful work. One hurdle is that, even ignoring the insane amount of connections needed, it would not be possible to connect each of those cores to each other one because their address spaces are so tiny.
anyway - say you want 50% of the transistors for on chip RAM these days, then thats
100 billion / 50 thousand = 2 million ARM 1s
clocking at say 3GHz
6e15 MIPS = 6 peta MIPS
so if you could run code on it, you would get a 10,000x speed up ;-)
https://www.righto.com/2015/12/reverse-engineering-arm1-ance...
Foreseen it was.
And in a way, those old 8-bit home computers also worked like a single integrated 'super-chip', because the whole system was driven by a single clock and entirely 'hard realtime', while modern computers are much more asynchronous (and I guess this asynchronous design is what enabled most performance improvements that go beyond pure transistor count scaling).
Z80 was the choice of a microprocessor for then home computers such as Radio Shack TRS-80, SORD M23P, M5, Sinclair ZX81, ZX Spectrum, KayPro II, and many other manufacturers.3 It was capable of running the CP/M operating system in most Z80-based PCs. Z80 had a reasonable share in the PC market until Intel revealed its 16-bit microprocessor in the mid-1980s. Z80 was very popular as a microprocessor not only in PC applications, but also in industrial embedded applications, and some of the big manufacturers have Z80 core inside their ASIC chips still today or use enhanced versions of Z80 in consumer electronic devices.4–7 Zilog still manufactures ez80, an enhanced version of the original Z80, which is still being used by Texas Instruments in its TI-84 and TI-84 Plus calculators.7 It is among the few silicon chips that made a remarkable impact on the electronic device industry.8 To this day, Zilog produces a range of Z80-based microprocessors and intelligent peripheral controllers, and they are available from reputed electronics component suppliers.2,9,10 This microprocessor is one of the longest living microprocessors of all time.