End-of-Life for Z80 CPU and Peripherals Announced

hackaday.com

46 points·josephcsible··10 comments

It’s a good thing we still have the eZ80. Someone will make a little board to make it a drop-in replacement (although much faster) for the Z80.

Are there any recent products that use the Z80? - excluding retro computing and electronics hobbiest devices.

The TI-86 Graphing calculator used it and was discontinued in 2006 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TI-86

> recent products

> excluding retro computing and electronics hobbiest devices

Not that I know of, but I wouldn't be surprised if some washing machine or something decided to use them over arm or some microcontroller.

I’ve seen it in random things that are expensive but with a random low-tech component thrown in to power some peripheral feature (i.e. appliances). Not in tech stuff where better and cheaper options abound.

With the exception of the TI-89, the TI-8x series used custom ICs based on a Z80 core - not the Z80 itself.

Are the foundries shutting these down because they’re such low density compared to what they could be making today?

Simply they have to maintain essentially obsolete equipment in order to make the devices?

Certainly it could be just raw market forces, I just don’t know how specialized the equipment is for this. Were they only making Z80s with this, or are there other product lines that they’re discontinuing as well.

ZX81. It all started with you buddy. Sad to see the end of an era.

Almost, but the ZX80 was also using the Z80 CPU:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ZX80

Not the first, but the Jupiter Ace always deserves a mention. For the curious: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jupiter_Ace

And the TRS-80 before that.

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