keithe@teklabs.UUCP (05/24/83)
I've been following the alleged development of the Z800 microprocessor since I got a look at the advance copy of the Product Announcement sheet. This one page blurb is dated September 1981, but copyrighted 1980 by Zilog, Inc. (so maybe I'm not supposed to tell you this?). It tantalizes the reader with statements like "three to five times the performance of a Z80A cpu..."; "12, 18, and 25 MHz internal processor clock rate", "multiply & divide instructions", "System & User modes", "on-chip memory management", "half-megabyte addressability", etc, etc, etc... In a later publication - the Z8108 Information Advance Bulletin (10 half-pages of information) - dated October 1982 is a description of the register set, the interrupt and trap structure, the addressing modes, the instruction set groupings, the memory management unit (it uses either 4k- or 8k-byte pages), the refresh mechanism, and the functional pin description. Makes it look like a "really neat part"... (By the way - the Zilog 'phone number is (408) 370-8120. Or call your local Zilog rep.) So where is this wunder-part? Well, it's still in design, from what I heard at Northcon last week. Maybe Zilog got enough people to say it looked like a good part that they decided to try to make some. But like the person posting the other article said - don't hold your breath!