4 ms·
Anyone wondering why the Z80 chip, just read the FAQ: https://collapseos.org/why.html https://collapseos.org/why.html "The z80 has 9000 transistors. 9000! Com
by tiborsaas 7y ago
Anyone wondering why the Z80 chip, just read the FAQ:
https://collapseos.org/why.html https://collapseos.org/why.html
"The z80 has 9000 transistors. 9000! Compared to the millions we have in any modern CPU, that's nothing!"
- AnimalMuppet 7y agoNo, it's 9000. That's not nothing. You may be able to scavenge old ones for a long time, but building new ones will be non-trivial.
- yellowapple 7y agoNon-trivial is still better than outright impossible.
- AnimalMuppet 7y agoWell, the first transistor was in 1947. The Z80 was first manufactured in 1976. That's 29 years of improvements in manufacturing technology before the Z80 was manufacturable. So if we have to start over, the Z80 is sure better than the Pentium (or at least, we can make it first), but it's still outright impossible for quite a while.
- yellowapple 7y agoIt's possible to build CPUs with many times the Z80's transistor count by hand¹, albeit with great effort and taking up a heck of a lot of space (and probably nowhere near the speeds of a single-chip Z80). ¹ http://megaprocessor.com/index.html http://megaprocessor.com/index.html