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

The other question would be which of the two would be more energy efficient, 's 160 million Z80s or my 16 overclocked to oblivion.

Traveller in Time on top
"Bogus Millions of instructions per second as used by the linux kernel to determine a delay.

Advantage is they have used Linux for nearly all procesors. Like stated before it is not an absolute measurement, just a rough geuss. I found several reports about a Z80 doing 0.004 BogoMips presuming it was about the 2.5 Mc version at > 6 clock cycles per instruction step .

If using the 50Mc version you could do with many less, still an impressive number though. "

160 million 2.5Mhz Z80s... how many 8Mhz z80's

Using some rough maths, 65-70 million

OK, who want to build it

...and one last question how many running at 3.25MHz (as in speed of the processor of a ZX81)

That's easy - just run 'Horace Goes Skiing' on a Pentium Pro and compare the best downhill times.

About 125 million.

You'd have to be a rich and eccentric billionaire with an 8 bit processor fetish as well as being completely barking mad to even contemplate it.

but would it get you on the cover of Popular Mechanics

Did anyone other than me ever wonder why Horace goes skiing was so named?

I always thought it should have been called "Horace spends hours attempting to cross the road"

And it was always the bloody ambulances that ran him over



Don't mind me, please carry on.

Aah, nostalgia! http://www.worldofspectrum.org/infoseekid.cgi?id=0002351

http://www.vavasour.ca/jeff/ts1000/index.html
http://rus.members.beeb.net/z81.html

I suppose now we just need to hit ebay and get 125 million ZX81's

Oh I dunno, just collect all those TV Remotes that fall down the back of the sofa and get lost!

So, what I really should be after on ebay is a dozen used sofas

Did you see that you're Quote of the Day, on the Front Page?

you are way off! Core 2 Duo processors have about 291 million transistors (source: http://news.zdnet.co.uk/emergingtech/0,1000000183,39285882,00.htm ), Zilog Z80s have 8500 (source: http://gecko54000.free.fr/?documentations=1976_Zilog_Z80 ). Therefore you'd only need about 35,000 Z80 processors to do the job. Even if it was an older dual core Pentium you'd only need about 70,000.

Traveller in Time pondering
"You are talking about the amount of silicium I thought the question was about processing power, not weight "