PureBasic Forums - English

Hello,

I am surprised by the Zilog Z80000. It was a 32 bits CPU, with several features, obviously :

- memory page protection
- virtual memory
- 4 register access (8, 16, 32 and 64 bits)
- 16*32 bits registers
- instruction cache

I do not know if it got a pipe-line, and I do not know its speed.
But what it is very (very) surprising is the quantity of transistors required : near 91000. What it seems a very small number.

To compare, a 80286 (x86 standard) had 134000 transistors for a 16-bits architecture.

About Z80000, did anybody use it ? Or did anybody study it ?

I remember that Steve Ciarcia of the magazine "Circuit Cellar" built a co-processor board for the IBM PC with a Z8000? CPU and published it in Byte Magazine around 1984 in two parts, he even included a compiler I think it was named Y or similar
if you care to search the magazine then this link may help https://vintageapple.org/byte/
[edit] the card was named "the trump card" http://www.dtweed.com/circuitcellar/trumpcrd.pdf

Hello Jack,

thank you for these links, I will read after a time of translation.

I found the speed range : between 10 MHz and 25 MHz.

It seems that this CPU has been compared to the 80386, containing near 275000 transistors.

What it surprises me the most, is the internal 64-bits multiplying and dividing op ! Very flexible.

In 1986, it was early, very early.