31–40 of 78 posts
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
This is understandable, considering that the M5 is the Ultimate Computer, powered by Dr. Richard Daystrom's very own engrams
¹ USS Enterprise, that is.
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
> 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.
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.
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
Tom Jennings, the creator of fidenet, is producing a nice modern Z80 computer[0] 0. https://www.ebay.ie/itm/206496219323
Ironically (and sadly) the Z80 was discontinued not very long after this piece was published.
We still have the venerable 8051 for anyone who likes old architectures!!
[1] https://spritesmods.com/?art=tamasingularity&page=2
[2] https://archive.org/details/furby-source
[3] https://dmitry.gr/?r=05.Projects&proj=37.%20Pixter#_TOC_a6fe...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm sure clones are still being made.
The cpu possibly, but I had a hard time trying to find the support chips (ctc, sio/pio, etc)...
The Z80 could even refresh the RAM by itself. It was not like the 8080 which required two support chips only to function.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The ARM 1 only had 25,000 or so.
wonders how ARM did that - the MIPS R2000 came in at ~115k and the 80286 ~134k 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 ;-)
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm sure clones are still being made.
The cpu possibly, but I had a hard time trying to find the support chips (ctc, sio/pio, etc)...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The ARM 1 only had 25,000 or so.
wonders how ARM did that - the MIPS R2000 came in at ~115k and the 80286 ~134k 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 ;-)
Acorn co-founder Hermann Hauser famously joked that he gave the original ARM microchip design team two distinct advantages: no time and no resources. With no money for a large crew or complex hardware, the tiny core team had to keep the processor design exceptionally simple, which ultimately birthed the revolutionary RISC architecture.
It also had to run in simulation on a BBC micro… Probably with a second processor via the Tube interface, but still.