CP/M survey - test-drb@ccmp.vtda.org

20 Apr 2007

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Subject: Re: CP/M survey
   From: "Chuck Guzis" <cclist at sydex.com>
   Date: Fri, 20 Apr 2007 01:03:36 -0700
     To: "General Discussion: On-Topic and Off-Topic Posts" <cctalk at
classiccmp.org>

On 19 Apr 2007 at 18:00, Allison wrote:

  Was that Charlie or Ted?  I'd like to see the
report or erata mostly 
 since it would fit nicely in my NEC file. 
I believe my contact was Rich Naro, but I'll have to check my old 
correspondence to make sure I'm not hallucinating.   
Sounds right as he replaced me more or less.  Back in 82/83 the Natick 
operation was merged with EA to become NEC Electronics USA and most of 
the high level functions went west. I didn't, DEC was more interesting.

...
   By time the
V20 hit the street I was running hand upd780s at 8mhz
 and had at least three s100 crates going. 
When did the Z80H hit the street?  Now, you can get a VHDL version 
that runs in an FPGA at what, something like 40 MHz?   
The z80H never got over 20mhz but, the 80S180 (z180) did hit the street
at 33mhz. When you consider thats an instruction execution rate around 
4mips thats not so bad.  The downside is memory has to be under 15ns
or one boatload of wait states!  There are more flavours of the Z180 
than carter has liver pills.

There are FPGA cells that run at truly amazing speeds and also beasts 
like the eZ80 that cut the number of clock cycles needed for speed.

The fastest machines I have (z80 based) is 10mhz (no waits) using 
Z80 CMOS and 12.5mhz running a Z280(version J).  The latter screams 
with the cache and MMU running with 16bit wide zbus.  The standard 
CP/M tools with raw speed and a harddisk makes for a very productive 
system.

Allison