The short answer is no, there is nothing to fear! But the Z80 has seen its life threatened during its 50-year lifespan.
In 2024, the Z80 finally reached end of life/last time buy status according to a Product Change Notification (PCN) that we saw via Mouser . Dated April 15, 2024, Zilog advised customers that its "Wafer Foundry Manufacturer will be discontinuing support for the Z80 product…" But fear not, as back in May 2024 , one developer was working on a drop-in replacement. Looking at Rejunity's Z80-Open-Silicon repository , we can see that did in fact happen via the Tiny Tapeout project.
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Les Pounder is an associate editor at Tom's Hardware. He is a creative technologist and for seven years has created projects to educate and inspire minds both young and old. He has worked with the Raspberry Pi Foundation to write and deliver their teacher training program \"Picademy\". ","collapsible":{"enabled":true,"maxHeight":250,"readMoreText":"Read more","readLessText":"Read less"}}), "https://slice.vanilla.futurecdn.net/13-4-13/js/authorBio.js"); } else { console.error('%c FTE ','background: #9306F9; color: #ffffff','no lazy slice hydration function available'); } Les Pounder Social Links Navigation Les Pounder is an associate editor at Tom's Hardware. He is a creative technologist and for seven years has created projects to educate and inspire minds both young and old. He has worked with the Raspberry Pi Foundation to write and deliver their teacher training program "Picademy".
Findecanor That reminds me a lot of ELIZA from 1966. which also had a bit more sophisticated responses. I'm sure it has been ported to Z80 machines at least once. Reply
pjmelect Findecanor said: That reminds me a lot of ELIZA from 1966. which also had a bit more sophisticated responses. I'm sure it has been ported to Z80 machines at least once. I used to run a version of ELIZA on my Z80 computer back in the 70s, it was a basic program of only a few K in size and “understood” about six words. At the time I was impressed by the program and added more words it understood to the program, however the added words did little to improve the program and I soon give up trying. It would be interesting to compare the two programs. Reply
bit_user The article said: 64kb of RAM No, it's 64 kB of RAM. Capital B = bytes. Lower case b = bits. Especially when talking about both network speeds and DRAM, it's important to distinguish which you mean! The quoted examples are a little underwhelming. I guess it's doing something , but it seems borderline random. It would be interesting to use a quantum computer to optimize such a tiny model. You might get something a little more useful out of it, and the number of parameters is getting down to a level that QCs should be able to handle, in the not-too-distant future. Reply
dirtygarbageman Dr Sbaitso from Creative Labs was replacing doctors in the 90s. Reply
bit_user dirtygarbageman said: Dr Sbaitso from Creative Labs was replacing doctors in the 90s. Wow, that's a blast from the past! …or should I say a Sound Blast from the past? No, no… I guess I shouldn't. Nobody should. : D Do you remember the talking parrot? I recall putting that in the autoexec.bat to speak a greeting, when the PC turned on. Reply
Key considerations
- Investor positioning can change fast
- Volatility remains possible near catalysts
- Macro rates and liquidity can dominate flows
Reference reading
- https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/artificial-intelligence/SPONSORED_LINK_URL
- https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/artificial-intelligence/developer-creates-conversational-ai-that-can-run-on-1976-zilog-z80-cpu-with-64kb-of-ram-features-a-tiny-chatbot-and-a-20-question-guessing-game#main
- https://www.tomshardware.com
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