On 2/9/20 2:58 PM, Adam Michlin wrote:
That fills a huge hole in my understanding of architecture history. It certainly makes sense that there would be separate ICs that eventually merged into one discrete CPU. I just assumed it was done by the minicomputer manufacturers themselves. I had no idea it was AMD! Thanks!
Well bit-slice chips were made by many manufacturers. Keep in mind the minicomputer manufacturers were the chip companies' bread & butter for a long time. Even Intel; they made the 3000 series of bit-slice parts. But it wasn't really separate ICs that eventually merged to form microprocessors. The Am2901 was introduced in 1975, well after there were a few microprocessors on the market. These chips, and their applications, coexisted with monolithic VLSI microprocessors for a long time. Bit-slice design was commonplace clear up until at least 1990. It was just a different way of doing things that was more scalable and flexible. And at the time of introduction of the VAX-11/730, for example, designing a single VLSI chip that implemented an architecture as complex as VAX wasn't really practical. The first single-chip VLSI implementation of the VAX architecture (the 78032, used in the MicroVAX-II and others) wouldn't tape out for another three years after that.
I'd love to find a Zilog Z8000, but don't imagine period correct Z8000s are so easy to come by. We have a Z8000 machine in the warehouse, but one of the big rules for this product is that no vintage computers will be harmed to make it happen. Are you talking about just a Z8000 chip? I can provide that for the exhibit. It will need ESD protection, of course.
Cool, we'll talk. And not only ESD protection, but non degradable ESD protection is being planned.
Ok. Go ahead and count on it being available and let me know how things progress. -Dave -- Dave McGuire, AK4HZ New Kensington, PA