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Zilog To File For Chapter 11
Frédéric writes: "The venerable company ZiLOG who was founded in 1974, and who brought us the famous Z80 CPU (used in the Timex/Sinclair ZX80/ZX81, and the Amstrad CPC/PCW computers), is filling for Chapter 11 ... I didn't find the today's news on the web, but found this article at Silicon Strategy and this one at Electronics times, which was written a few days ago to announce it."
And the CPU in many of the TRS-80 computers.
And the men who hold high places must be the ones who start
To mold a new reality... closer to the heart
ZiLOG intends to launch an exchange offer in which all holders of its notes will be offered the opportunity to exchange their notes for shares of ZiLOG common stock, plus a pro rata share of the $30 million non-recourse note. The exchange offer, which for tax and other legal reasons the company intends to complete through a prepackaged Chapter 11 filing, is not expected to have any adverse affect on its day-to-day operations or on its ability to provide a full range of products and services to its customers or pay its suppliers on normal terms.
I dont think we have much to worry about here.
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No. The 8088 was a "bus limited" version of the 8086, Intel's first generation of the x86 architecture.
Internally, the 8088 was identical to the 8086, same registers, same instruction set, but it had the advantage of working on all the 8-bit bus infrastructure.
Remember, this is not an involuntary bankruptcy (at least not completely). Zilog is filing a "pre-pack" which means that they've gotten together in advance with all of their creditors and gotten them to exchange their debt for equity. Zilog will not disappear - in fact, this really only stands to make them financially healthier.
And a instantly-networkable Z-80 will definitely fill some needs, if only for the plentifulness of implementing distributed systems via TCP/IP.
Yes, even Commodore used a Z80. Specifically in the C-128, which could boot into a CP/M mode running on the Z80, or into regular C-128 mode on the 8502, or into C-64 emulation mode (also on the 8502). I don't think there was any way to run both CPUs at the same time.
I don't know how many people actually used this feature (probably not many, given how well the C-128 did in the marketplace), but it was kind of neat at the time.
Pop quiz, hot shot. Tell me what this Z80 code does...
LD BC,0FFFFH
LOOP: DEC BC
JP NZ,LOOP
Go ahead, tell me I am trolling, but how on earth did a company with an ancient, 8-bit architecture manage to get idiots to throw $280M at it?
By creating an architecture that is still used today in everything from calculators to embedded industrial control applications. Not every application needs ghz class CPUs, 512MB of RAM, and pipelined parallel processing.
It's guys like you that keep guys like me employed. Every problem presented to you is solved with a PC in some form factor or another. Computerized home thermostat? Mini PC on a board. Web server for monitoring temperature and pressure? PC in a rack mount case with an A/D board. Telephone voice mail system? PC in a funny looking case. Then when your product is hopelessly over the price target and behind schedule, guys like me get calls, choose an appropriate architecture, be it a PIC, Z80, AVR, or something else, and get the project back in line with reality.
Go ahead and mod this down as flamebait or troll if you want. I've got 50 Karma points as I post this so I'll live with 47 if need be.
Chapter 11 - Chapter 11 of the Bankruptcy Code is frequently referred to as "reorganization." Although an individual may file under Chapter 11, generally it is used to reorganize a business. Individuals with large federal or state tax obligations may use Chapter 11 because an extended period of time may be obtained for the repayment of the taxes. Chapter 11 generally allows the debtor to continue its business operations as it proceeds to the desired goal of a confirmed Plan of Reorganization, which must meet certain statutory criteria. A major rationale for business reorganizations is that the value of a business as an ongoing concern is greater than it would be if its assets were liquidated and sold. Generally, it is more economically efficient in the long run to reorganize than to liquidate, because doing so preserves jobs and assets. Cooperation among the various interests, however, is crucial to a successful reorganization.
Chapter 7 is liquidation where basically everything is gone. Chapter 11 doesn't necessarily mean death for a company. Hell, look at Chrysler.
Yep, the 8080 came first. The Z-80 second.
The Z-80 added block i/o and block move instructions, along with a mirror register set. Mostly, one would avoid these instructions to provide compatibility for the 8080-using luddites of the time. Sure, it was possible to detect. We would opt for smaller code size many times as 64K was the limit unless of course the machine was of the nifty bank-switching variety. Every byte used by the BIOS took away from CP/M's TPA (Transient Program Area, the limit on the size of the application). BITD, some vendors beat out the competition on TPA size alone.
The mirror register set was a real bonus over the 8080. It took only a handful of clock cycles, and was way cheaper than pushing/popping in an ISR.
cat
Man, lots of fond reminiscing here about the Z80 (and clones). Quite rightly, too... the Z80 was a fun little beast.
... rr14). The Z8001 and Z8003 were "segmented", but they used a reasonable segmentation model to achieve 8M memory...
Zilog, however, made lots of other stuff. Some were moderately successful (Z8530 SCC), some not so (Z8000 MPU).
The Z8000 actually was fairly popular in military applications until COTS took over. I seem to recall many avionics systems used it. When it came out, it was comparable to the 68K.
It had 16 16bit registers (r0-r15), each of which could be addressed as 2 8-bit registers (rhN, rlN). R15 was the stack pointer. Nice orthagonal instruction set, with logical block moves (similar to the Z80 LDIR instruction), as compared to the intel REP instructions...
The registers could be doubled up into 32-bit registers (rr0, rr2,
The low 16 bits were the offset in the segment, and the high 7 bits were the segment number. So, you essentially had 23 bit addressing. Of course, the way you generated segmented addresses was a tad odd... I believe bits 30:24 were the segement number in a 32-bit address.
Only problem was, they never got the Z8070 FPU working. Bummer.
Fascism starts when the efficiency of the government becomes more important than the rights of the people.
[+] actually this was a marketing lie. It had 32K RAM and 16K ROM with a unified address space. I think the 16K version had the same ROM, so it would be fairer to call that a 32K, if you want to include the total...
Nope - it was 16K + 48K in a 64k address space. What you might be thinking of is the following though: at least one issue of the spectrum PCB was designed to use 'broken' hitachi 32k chips, in which the top half was dead, since sinclair had gotten a batch of them cheap. Considering his first business in the 60s as a teenager was buying 'dead' transistors from Mullard and re-testing and re-labeling them to their true spec for sale to impoverished hobbyists, this story holds water to some degree.
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