Collection of Intel 8080 microprocessors | Hacker News Reader

Collection of Intel 8080 microprocessors

demin.ws

60 pointsbegoon20 comments

You do not include the 8085, Intel's response to the Z80, with some new instructions some of which were not documented. There was, I believe, a period of several months shortly after the 8085 introduction when the 8080 parts shipped by Intel were actually made by Texas Instrument since Intel had lost the 8080 process.

Having very little knowledge about processors and chips, I particularly enjoyed the last bit where you say

This is how I took pictures of all these chips in a quite technological way using one iPhone and two Raspberry Pi

very funny

Well, I was experimenting for while with light to avoid shadows, and that setup was the best I could build that dark night ;-)

I'm surprised there are no Zilog (Z80) chips in this collection. They were an 8080 clone, massively popular, with a very useful set of extended instructions including block copies and an extended register set.

There's so many Z80's they'd be a whole collection by themselves. And I guess the Z80 had so many new features, it was a clear break with the 8080.

Zilog is a different story. I love them as well, but i8080 is quite exceptional to me personally. Somehow it still remember almost all machine codes of this CPU and can program even without the assembler ;-). I know, Z80 is a derivative from i8080 compatible in most of instructions, so maybe another collection.

It's a great collection.

What I really liked about the Z80 was the sane and regular assembler syntax. I know that's not a feature of the Z80 per-se, but when Zilog had copyright problems with the Intel assembler, I think they went one better.

    ld a,(hl)

load accumulator from the address pointed to by the hl register pair

The equivalent 8080 was:

    mov a,m

where you had to know that 'm' was really the h & l registers paired plus indirected. The Intel syntax was very irregular, eg. "mvi" was move an immediate value into a register, "stax" was store (something? I forget exactly). "lxi" was load immediate(?) into a register pair?

The Zilog syntax used "ld" for all of them.

The only better assembler I've used was the 68000.

Edit: Found a good Intel<->Zilog translation here: http://nemesis.lonestar.org/computers/tandy/software/apps/m4... Wow, Intel really was ugly.

I love seeing how other people express and communicate the things they are passionate about. I fully support people geeking out about whatever they please, as long as it makes them happy :)

do any of you have the real story on AMD's 8080 clone?

also really interested in this ^^.

The link above is exactly what I read. Very interesting.

This covers a good part of it I think:

http://silicongenesis.stanford.edu/transcripts/hailey.htm

I love that you staged the photos by propping a phone on top of two Pibows, I'm one of the guys who makes those in Sheffield, UK :)

That was a particularly uninteresting collection of identical-looking things.

Perhaps if you find it uninteresting you should refrain from commenting? Just a friendly suggestion. I mean, what value are you adding by saying you find it uninteresting?

What makes your comment particularly annoying is that it is obvious you haven't even read the short article that accompany the pictures. It states two things:

"Testing revealed that all processors are identical according to the CPU Exerciser except clones from AMD."

"Interestingly, AMD i8080-compatible chips were reverse-engineered from schematics literally stolen from Intel."

In other words, they are identical, which is why they look identical. DUH!

Now now, I'm surprised my light-hearted post caused such a backlash.

>Perhaps if you find it uninteresting you should refrain from commenting? Just a friendly suggestion. I mean, what value are you adding by saying you find it uninteresting?

For one, I can't downvote, so this is the only way I could express my disapproval. And different opinions are valuable in themselves, as you can't have rational, democratic discourse without them.

>In other words, they are identical, which is why they look identical. DUH!

That doesn't even disprove what I said, rather affirms it. It's like saying "The emperor is nude, that's why he seems to have no clothes. DUH!".

>> It's like saying "The emperor is nude, that's why he seems to have no clothes. DUH!".

Exactly. Stating the obvious on a site known for intelligent discussions is frowned upon.

> And different opinions are valuable in themselves, as you can't have rational, democratic discourse without them.

No one minds different opinions. But people do want a bit more substance in those opinions so that there can be some kind of discussion.

> I can't downvote, so this is the only way I could express my disapproval.

Not upvoting this article, but upvoting other articles, would have been one way to express disapproval.

Well, didn't my previous post have substance? It's like everything I say nowadays gets buried. I'm going to guess it's power users trying to silence the small fry.

Your first post in this thread was empty. Unfortunately there is a kind of "pile on" effect, where all your posts in this thread get downvoted even if those posts don't deserve a downvote.

Hopefully that will correct after a few hours - other people will upvote any incorrectly downvoted comments.

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