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Captain Zilog Crushed: The Story of the Z8000

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Re: Captain Zilog Crushed: The Story of the Z8000

#61

Post by RetroTechie »

PaulHoule wrote: post #2

I have so much moe for the various post-Z80 chips Zilog made that people think failed in the marketplace but are still around and perfectly viable for applications that don't need 32-bit https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zilog_eZ80 But the thing is that you keep getting dragged kicking and screaming to ARM because even if it is boring it is capable, affordable and everywhere.

In late 80s you'd still have a significant cost difference between 8 (or 16) bit CPUs and more powerful ones like the 68K. 10k or 100k transistors mattered a lot.

These days most smaller cores are integrated with peripherals, which can easily take the bulk of the silicon area (+cost). Then it's effectively free to tack on a small 32 bit core like Cortex-Mx (or even small 64b core). Why bother with 8/16 bit one?

I suspect RISC-V may eat a lot of that market in years ahead.

For components where CPU core is a good portion of the silicon (microcontrollers, RFID tags, toys, etc etc), that may be different. That's why many old 8/16 bit architectures are still around in one form or another.

Re: Captain Zilog Crushed: The Story of the Z8000

#62

Post by kens »

dfawcus wrote: post #59
kens wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The NEC V33 (1988) was a hardwired (not microcoded) version of the 286. The decision not to use microcode might be related to the long lawsuit between Intel and NEC over microcode. Also, as krylon points out, RISC chips generally don't use microcode.

According to the datasheet, which I've just looked at, it was not a '286 equivalent. Rather it added a paging mechanism whereby a 20 bit 'linear' address was mapped to a 24 bit 'physical' address. Using 1024 16k pages, so a bit like an internal LIM 4.0 scheme, but limited to 16M total rather than 24M. It has a pair of new instructions, to enter and exit the extended mapping mode, and the mappings are only changeable…

You are correct.

Re: Captain Zilog Crushed: The Story of the Z8000

#63

Post by jacquesm »

canucker2016 wrote: post #58
jacquesm wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I used some pretty beefy boxes for industrial systems in the 80's and what struck me about them - and of the PCs of that era - is that they were all built to last for decades. Modern stuff is built to last for a couple of years at best in most cases, with some rare exceptions. Flimsy cases, plastic instead of steel. Unserviceable, non-standard and proprietary instead of standardized and repairable. Miniaturized as mu…

One story I heard was about Compaq and how their early PCs were over-engineered. The floppy drives of early Compaq PCs were rated/tested for a really high number of insertions/ejections. You'd have to be doing nothing BUT inserting/ejecting floppies 24/7 to even get close to the rated limit. Some beancounter at Compaq realizes they're overpaying. They lower the rated limit of insertions/ejections by a couple orders o…

I remember their Deskpro line around that time. Insanely heavy.

Re: Captain Zilog Crushed: The Story of the Z8000

#64

Post by RetroTechie »

klelatti wrote: post #22
FirmwareBurner wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>TI is launching a $0.40 (!) ARM micro soon. [...] It's just the new default in the same way that z80 was a default. And yet many cheap electronic devices will continue to be built and sold with 4-bit microcontrollers because 32 bit is overkill for those use cases and $0.40 is too expensive when 4-bit dies cost $0.05 or even $0.01, and $0.35 in savings is huge in high enough volume. You won't see any new products dev…

Out of curiosity what’s the cheapest microcontroller die you’ve come across? It would be interesting to know what you get at the lowest possible price point.

Over on EEVblog there was talk of a 3 cents uC from Padauk: (w/ several follow-ups)

https://www.eevblog.com/2018/11/07/eevblog-1132-the-3-cent-m...

That 3c is packaged & all :-) One-time programmable iirc.

Re: Captain Zilog Crushed: The Story of the Z8000

#65

Post by rasz »

rwmj wrote: post #14

Does anyone have the history for why number of pins was such an important consideration (not just for Zilog, Intel too)? Was it really that much more expensive to make a 64 pin package than a 40 pin one?

In US, due to cost. Japanese fully embraced SMT in mid eighties, and were already mass manufacturing products with ~100 pin QFP chips https://www.shmj.or.jp/english/packaging/pac80s.html.

I cant find it now, but I remember in one of Asianometry videos a history of Japanese manufacturer traveling to Texas and discovering he can offer American clients his lead frames at 1/10 domestic cost and still make a killing.

Re: Captain Zilog Crushed: The Story of the Z8000

#66

Post by drpixie »

PaulHoule wrote: post #56
drpixie wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're right there. As transistors got cheaper, we've got into the habit of using them en-mass to prop up horrible architectures with weird (but effective) tricks like enormous look-ahead, stupendous pipelines, and gigantic caches. I recall with considerable fondness those ISAs that could be understood in ultimate detail by a simple human - the monolithic supercomputers like the Cray 1.

I dunno. There was that strange time in the 1980s where progress in microprocessors hung in the air, where Apple couldn't really find a sequel to the Apple ][, where the TRS-80 Model 4 wasn't much better than the Model 3 which wasn't better than the model 1, where Commodore came out with a new machine every year but only a few of them made any traction. Coding assembly for the 8088 it was painfully obvious that instr…

I find it intriguing that memory is not just A bottleneck these days, but that memory is SO much slower than CPU. A big part of the performance difference must be the move off the main chip, but it just seems that when cache can be so quick, memory should be faster than it is.

Re: Captain Zilog Crushed: The Story of the Z8000

#67

Post by klelatti »

RetroTechie wrote: post #64
klelatti wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Out of curiosity what’s the cheapest microcontroller die you’ve come across? It would be interesting to know what you get at the lowest possible price point.

Over on EEVblog there was talk of a 3 cents uC from Padauk: (w/ several follow-ups) https://www.eevblog.com/2018/11/07/eevblog-1132-the-3-cent-m... That 3c is packaged & all :-) One-time programmable iirc.

Very interesting. Thanks!

Re: Captain Zilog Crushed: The Story of the Z8000

#68

Post by tony69 »

systems_glitch wrote: post #40
rwmj wrote: post #14

Does anyone have the history for why number of pins was such an important consideration (not just for Zilog, Intel too)? Was it really that much more expensive to make a 64 pin package than a 40 pin one?

Packaging had been a limiting factor for a long time, e.g. the Intel 8008 has the weird multiplexed bus it has, and requires so much external logic, because Intel was largely "just" a memory chip company at the time and couldn't package bigger than 18 pin DIPs. Prototype carriers were likely significantly more expensive for >40 pin DIPs, just due to the lower demand. The ceramic packages with a die well and glued or…

> because Intel was largely "just" a memory chip company at the time

Intel management didn’t want to pivot to microchips despite the team’s pleads, so they left and founded Zilog, which eventually prompted Intel to pivot (https://www.amazon.com/Silicon-Invention-Microprocessor-Scie...)

Re: Captain Zilog Crushed: The Story of the Z8000

#69

Post by HocusLocus »

The Z80 will always be my first love, in a TRS-80 Model 1 and soon after, the Vector Graphic Vector 3 which was a sturdy S-100 machine running CP/M. Robert Harp of Vector was an extremely competent designer faced with a challenge, a computer with CPU, CRT and keyboard in one unit. All-in-one machines were a challenge because noise from the video stream and HV flyback transformer pervaded the insides, so he restricted the 6 card S-100 cage width to a few inches and found the worst transients on signal lines and placed extra conditioning on the bus, mods reported back to Zilog to assist with future Z80/S-100 builds. The Vector 3 paper manual had 40 dense pages in the back with commented assembly of its entire BIOS. That was a nice touch and I taught myself assembler from it.

Re: Captain Zilog Crushed: The Story of the Z8000

#70

Post by simne »

Very impressed, how obvious looking high level design flaws of Z8000. And these are not technical flaws, but sure C-level decision flaws.

Only one question decided it's fate - why SMALL startup decided to make CHEAP design?

- It was obvious, it was impossible to compete with Intel on large cheap market. But obviously, Intel would not compete on niches, where startup without legacy could make something significantly better!

Exxon as a foundation, is not good, because their money was not money of Faggin, even more than money of investors are not money of Intel execs.

So, second drawback, of Zilog's situation, that Faggin was far more limited in maneuver then Intel's tops. So why he even more limited himself with cheap design?

I see only possible explanation, Faggin just was not brave enough, to propose Exxon tops something more brave, like 68k. Or he really was, but they chosen simpler and more traditional design for that time.

Finally, I think, Faggin was tech genius, but looks like, this time some political things overweight to obviously flawed decision.

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