More thoughts on building a Z-80 (64bit!!!)

From: Arfon Gryffydd <ArfonRG_at_DIEspammerSCUM.Texas.Net>
Date: Thu Oct 22 09:45:58 1998

You guys are really raining on my parade....

I have looked at Z180's, Z380's and etc.... They are SLOW!!!!!! The
only availabe packaging for the Z380 is un-useable to me as a hobbist
(without a lot of headache.)

I hate the way that Zilog has taken the nice and simple control bus scheme
of the Z-80 and really made it a pain-in-the-butt on the Z-380!.

So, If some company would take the Z-bus (but with an (input/output) data
size set of bus control lines), Z-80 instruction set and match a DEC Alpha
performance (at a cheap price of-course), I would worship that company.
(Oh yes, I want a 64bit data bus and a 128bit address bus). Is this asking
for too much? Why can't we all just get along?

Since this is a dream:
My thoughts are this: If I can find some REALLY SIMPLE mirco-controllers
that do just the basic microprocessor functions, I can parallel them to
make them read-in and intrepret Z-80 code.

I cannot see why massively populated microprocessors (like the PPC, Intel,
and DEC Alpha) can reach clock speeds of 600 Mcyc and a really simple (one
accumulator, bare instruction set) microcontroller can't exceed those speeds!

If I got some of these micro-controllers and had two or three of them
reading in instructions ahead of execution (looking for branches) I could
do half of the job and speed up the through-put.

Then use several more u-controllers acting in parallel to actually do the
instruction execution.

For math, a bunch of stinking fast memory locations acting as look-up tables.

Any ideas?
Received on Thu Oct 22 1998 - 09:45:58 BST

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