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- Hacker News
- interesting to be reminded that an 8080 (8 bit datapath) took 4,800 transistors
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
by librasteve - Nitpicking, but since the M5 includes cache and GPU a more realistic comparision would probably be to count all transistors in an entire 8-bit home computer system against a modern integrated GCPU (e.g. from googling around a C64 might have around 0.75 million transistors, most in the memory chips).
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).
by flohofwoe - Yup and Moore's law about transistors doubling every 18 to 24 months did basically hold, which is even more impressive.
Foreseen it was.
- This is understandable, considering that the M5 is the Ultimate Computer, powered by Dr. Richard Daystrom's very own engramsby dosisking
- The ARM 1 only had 25,000 or so.by dofm
- > 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.
by Someone - Anyone who had a cheap media player in the early 2000s probably had one with a Z80-based SoC: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S1_MP3_playerby userbinator
- Reminded me good old days.. games loaded from cassette recorder and my first program for Spectrum which was a simple drawing tool I proudly called "graphic editor" :)by evalystai
- The inventor of the Z80 Fredrico Faggin is promoting a consciousness first universe nowby AIorNot
- I read his book, honestly I think he's right.by kayamon
- Rare find https://www.zosya.net/file/TTT_in_detail.pdf - Russian, probably can be translated easily, long story on how one of the games for ZX was madeby RomanPushkin
- The Z80 was my "first" microprocessor, in an odd way. I've never touched one.
It was the early 80s, and my mom was getting Byte Magazine, which I devoured. I had taken a high school programming class in BASIC, and was interested in electronics. Radio Shack had a shelf of books, and I was going through them one by one as I could afford them. They had William Barden's book on the Z80, published by Howard Sams, because the TRS-80 used it.
That book was so clearly and methodically written, that a high school kid could understand it. Later on I added some scraps of inline assembler here and there in programs, but eventually got into microcontrollers, which I continue to play with.
I admit that my mental model of microcontrollers is still based on those 8 bit machines, and I owe a debt to the Z80.
by analog31 - I only went through the partially rat–soiled magazines my dad "stored" in his in-laws root cellar many decades later but I still love the CPU.by avadodin
- My first ambitious project was a Z80 assembler. The Z8000 (much later) was distinguished by being the last random-logic (not microcoded) microprocessor of it's day.by JoeAltmaier
- Interesting interview with Frederico Faggin on of the two designers of the z80 https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=28JtL1WVjMwby christkv
- Ironically (and sadly) the Z80 was discontinued not very long after this piece was published.
- I'm sure clones are still being made.by grishka
- We still have the venerable 8051 for anyone who likes old architectures!!by dragontamer
- There are a number of efforts to make low volume production of compatible parts - see https://github.com/rejunity/z80-open-silicon
There are also FPGA emulated versions.
by mithro - IIRC, only the classic 40-pin DIP Z80 was discontinued. The eZ80, which is fully compatible, is still in production.by Gormo
- > Then, as a young engineer, I worked in a large mainframe computer system based on Z80.
This sentence threw me a little bit. Which mainframes were based on the Z80? I'd love to know more about that.
by Lio - If it wasnt some mostly custom system it was probably an HP 64000 Logic Development System. Which used Z80s to run user facing software and control the actual mainframe. I doubt it was a pure Z80 "mainframe". Loved to be proved wrong though!by helf
- S100 systems were sometimes called mainframes after their card cage construction: usually with the qualifier “s-100 mainframe” for the system or the enclosure and backplane.by buescher
- Morrow systems ran on a Unix flavor, could address 16MB all on Z80, had memory protection and could have up to 6 simultaneous users. Micronix was the only Unix-like multiuser system ever to run on an 8 bit processor.
https://ia902902.us.archive.org/20/items/mame0.211manualsful...
by JPLeRouzic - Due to its simplicity it's a fun little processor to program. Hacking on some assembly on a ZX spectrum emulator is a nice way to stay sane in this high abstraction LLM age.by meekins
- I cut my teeth writing assembly on a ZX Spectrum (mostly hacking games for infinite lives, etc).
Over the past couple of years I've gone back to the Z80, working on CP/M emulation, testing, and similar things. It's fun to play the old infocom games, and mess around with BIOSes when all you have is 64k.
There's a lot of good CP/M reference material out there, and numerous emulators to run it on modern systems
by stevekemp - "Simple" is really not a word I would associate with the Z80 ;)
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 :)
by flohofwoe - Tom Jennings, the creator of fidenet, is producing a nice modern Z80 computer[0]by getfacl
- Woah that’s cool! I love the case!by bananaboy
- (emulated)by varjag