4 ms·
> informed by the annoyance of having fiddled with the Z8000's awkward segmented architecture. That's interesting, I was under the impression that Z8000 uptake
by marktangotango 5y ago
> informed by the annoyance of having fiddled with the Z8000's awkward segmented architecture.
That's interesting, I was under the impression that Z8000 uptake was hindered due to bugs in it's implementation, do you have any references about this segmented architecture?
- cmrdporcupine 5y agoI'm not saying the segmentation is the reason Z8000 uptake was low, I have no idea why it didn't succeed. But you can read about the Z8000's segmentation on WP: "The Z8000 used a segmented memory map, with a 7-bit "segment number" and a 16-bit offset. Both numbers were represented by pins on the Z8001, meaning that it could directly address a 23-bit memory, or 8 MB.[4] Instructions could only directly access a 16-bit offset." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zilog_Z8000#Memory_handling https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zilog_Z8000#Memory_handling Many 16-bit systems around this time did this kind of thing. Makes it really annoying to do things like draw in a framebuffer bigger than 64k. It does look like at least the PC could hold a whole 23-bit address, so that's good. The 68000 had a nice flat linear memory model and that made it much easier to write code for.