h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

How many Z80 processors you would need to match the processing power of a modern duel core Pentium

I don't know the theoretical answer, but we weren't running resource-hungry OS & applications like Microsoft XP / Office on a z80, were we? Things always seemed OK at the time.

that they did but now I'm curious as to how many Z80's I'd theoretically have to link together run a resource-hungry OS & applications

I recon two... maybe more what was the MHZ type performance of a z80? low I'm guessing.... but besides the mere tenant of the MHZ/processing power what about things like front end bus speed and RAM? it'd be hard to compaire I guess if not impossible as the whole artecture of a modern PC due core setup is so wildly differnt Mind, I was reading with interest the other day about the new I think Asus motherboard that has sufficient power/room to put an OS on the chipset

8 bit and up to 8 MHz for the classic NMOS design, and up to 20 MHz for the current CMOS design - if that helps anybody

z80 was a 4Mhz (assuming you mean the z80a 8bit processor).

Ne'er mind bus speeds, any such physical implementation would have to be custom designed anyway. And you'd have to use a parallel processing design so you'd not be comparing like with like as it isn't just a case of adding up the processor speeds or benchmarks.
Also depends on the OS sat on top, since a dual core isn't parallel processor since you only use the 2 cores if the OS can handle it.

I'm sure someone on slashdot will have done a beowulf cluster of things at some point!

Re: os on chip. There's at least one bios out there now that is essentially an os on chip.

Oh, and one last thing I didn't realise (and dunno if it is still true) - apparently a lot of remote controls use the Z80 as their processor - such a come down for the mighty z80!

"z80 was a 4Mhz"

If we are taking about the classic NMOS design it started out at 2.5Mhz and during its production run the speed was gradually increased to 8Mhz.

Yeah, saw your post after I entered mine!

...and I still want know how many Z80's one would need running in parallel to match the processing power of modern duel core Pentium

...and I want that Z80 beowulf cluster

Traveller in Time calculating BogoMips
"
Z80 2.5 Mc 0.004 BogoMips

8088 running at 1.75 BogoMips

Dual Pentium 2.4Ghz 6403.52 BogoMips

6403.52/ 0.004 = 160 088 000

About 160 million Z80 processors, concidering making them parralel does not consume time "

"and I still want know how many Z80's one would need running in parallel to match the processing power of modern duel core Pentium"

I reckon the only way to find out would be to build it. Plus you'd get shed loads of geek points for doing so

Either that or some horribly complex maths. Thing is, a dual core is really 2 processors on 1 chip. The power in them relies on the OS using them. So first off you need to work out whether or not you are going to equate to the 2 cores running under a parallel os or just to one of the cores running on its own. Then you need to specify the clock speed of both sets of processors. Then work out what sort of task you are going to measure on - i.e. using internal storage only or including memory access (whereupon you'd need to work out some sort of way to create equivalent memory access).

Traveller in Time measuring relative
"You need something like BogoMips, a non scientifical way to measure processor speed. "

I'd love to see the machine when it sup and running

The problem is that 1 cpu(~8mhz) + 1 cpu(~8mhz) != 1 cpu (~16mhz)
when parallelised (which is what you'd have to do in hardware to make any meaningful comparison).
Same goes for bogomips, since 2 processors won't do nothing twice as fast as 1 processor.
I think, anyway!

Traveller in Time not
"One Z80 produces a little power 100 million produce a lot.
One Z80 does not weigh much 100 million require a dedicated frame. "

Traveller in Time on top
"That is the unscientific part of the BogoMips. Still using BogoMips is a better comparison then Clock speed. "

true

I was going to try a rough calc of current vs my first (mainframe) experience and try to place z80 within the (comparative) time frame - but 100M-odd z80s put me right off.

Mip, OK - but what's a BogoMip?

160 million? You could probably achieve the same result with as few as 16 (possibly 20 or maybe a few more because of the overhead of combining and converting all those 8 bit calculations into 64 bit calculations) if you overclocked them a bit so they match the dual core P4's 2.5GHz. They might run a little on the hot side though.