Z80 – The 1970s Microprocessor Still Alive (2021)

Post by dofm » Sat, Aug 22, 2026, 7:46 PM UTC

icelusxl wrote: post #37

librasteve wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ;-)

ARM1 has no cache memory, no hardware multiply and division, no MMU and no cache.

Post by kayamon » Sat, Aug 22, 2026, 10:25 PM UTC

AIorNot wrote: post #40

The inventor of the Z80 Fredrico Faggin is promoting a consciousness first universe now https://youtu.be/-vz5LU2ECm0?is=g1T-QM8Lq9qNyiNK

Post by imtringued » Sat, Aug 22, 2026, 10:42 PM UTC

Someone wrote: post #28

librasteve wrote: post #10

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.

Post by t1234s » Sun, Aug 23, 2026, 12:58 AM UTC

Post by joshu » Sun, Aug 23, 2026, 3:08 AM UTC

spacedcowboy wrote: post #39

librasteve wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ;-)

> wonders how ARM did that 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… Probab…