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A comment on The Chloe 280SE, a New Z80 Microcomputer. Parent comment

Re:The Chloe 280SE, a New Z80 Microcomputer by bryanlarsen on Tuesday February 04, 2020 @12:00PM (#22237945)
A Z800 type design that came out in 1980 probably would have sucked too. A 16 bit 6502 shouldn't have sucked because the 6502 is a nice simple micro, but Z80 is a lot bigger, and making a 16 bit version of it in 1980 with the transistor and packaging budget of 1980 probably would have had a whole bunch of nasty compromises.

But our opinion as engineers doesn't really matter much. x86 beat the 68K even though the 68K is a nice chip and the 8086 ... isn't.

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Re:The Chloe 280SE, a New Z80 Microcomputer by cmrdporcupine on Tuesday February 04, 2020 @12:05PM (#22238001)
In the 80s it beat the 68k by marketshare but didn't completely destroy it. Between the Mac, the Atari ST, the Amiga, and a bunch of Unix workstation vendors the 680x0 had a fairly large market share. But Motorola killed it when they could have evolved it. Intel evolved the 486 to the Pentium, and squeezed everything it could out of the ISA -- but Motorola sidetracked onto 88000 and PowerPC and didn't take the 68k past the 68060. And they dragged Apple with them onto the PowerPC. And honestly, Macs from that era _sucked_ -- PowerPC could emulate the 68k but they crashed constantly and it wasn't just because of the OS's lack of memory protection and the like. The systems were full of bugs because of the architecture switch. Waste of $$ and engineering time.
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Re:The Chloe 280SE, a New Z80 Microcomputer by cmrdporcupine on Tuesday February 04, 2020 @12:07PM (#22238029)
Also, if you squint right... a "z800" type design was basically the 286/386/486, no? The Z80 was a derivation of the 8080 architecture. 8086/286/386/486/Pentium was, too.
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Re:The Chloe 280SE, a New Z80 Microcomputer by mark-r on Tuesday February 04, 2020 @07:15PM (#22242647)
That amount of squinting would wreck your eyesight. The x86 line wasn't even close to binary compatible. The assembly language wasn't too hard to convert, but it still required work.
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