Z80 and galloping through other Zilog products

This processor became along with the 6502 the main processor of the first personal computers. There are no dramatic events in the history of its appearance and use. There is only some intrigue in the failure of Zilog to make the next generation of processors. The Z80 was first produced in 1976 and its variants are still in production. Once even Bill Gates himself announced support for systems based on the z80.

A number of coincidences are interesting. As in the case of the 6502 the main developer of the Z80 Federico Faggin left a large company, Intel. After working on the z80 Federico almost did not work with the next generation the Z8000 processor. He left Zilog (founded by him) in the early 80's and never dealt with processors in the future. He then created several relatively successful startups, which were communication systems, touchpads and digital cameras. It can be mentioned that in addition to the z80 being with Zilog he had also developed a successful and still-produced Z8 microcontroller.

The Z80 is more convenient for inclusion in computer systems than the 8080. It requires only one power supply voltage and has built-in support for the regeneration of dynamic memory. In addition though it is fully compatible with the 8080 it has a lot of new commands, a second set of basic registers and several completely new registers. It is interesting that Zilog refused to use the 8080 assembler mnemonics, and began to use their own mnemonics more suitable for the extended command system of the z80. A similar story happened to the Intel x86 assembler in the GNU software world, for some reason they also use their own conventions for writing programs in assembler by default. The Z80 added support for the overflow flag, Intel officially added support for this flag only in the 8086. However this flag in the z80 was combined with the parity flag, so you cannot use both flags at the same time as in the 8086. In the z80 as in the 6502 there are only basic checks of the value of the flag, i.e. there are no checks of two or three flags at once, which is necessary for unsigned comparisons "greater" or "less or equal", as well as for all signed comparisons. In such cases it is necessary to do several checks, while with the 8086, 6800 or PDP-11 one is enough.

Among the new z80's instructions, block memory copy commands for 21 cycles per byte are especially impressive, as well as an interesting instruction searching for a byte in memory. Similar block instructions for input and output have also been added. However the EXX instruction is the most interesting it swaps the contents of 48 bits of register memory, registers BC, DE, HL, with their counterparts in just 4 cycles! Even the 32-bit ARM will need at least 6 cycles for the similar operation. The remaining additional instructions are not so impressive, although they can sometimes be useful. Additionally added were the following commands:

• 16-bit subtraction with borrow and 16-bit addition with carry for 15 clocks;
• unary minus for the accumulator for 8 clocks;
• possibility to read from memory and write to it, using registers BC, DE, SP, IX, IY – not just HL;
• shifts, rotates and input-output for all 8-bit registers;
• instructions to check, set and reset a bit by its number;
• relocatable jumps with offsets (JR): an unconditional and conditional jumps for zero and carry flags;
• a loop instruction;
• very unusual instructions for decimal rotations RLD and RRD, similar to which were only for IBM mainframes;
• instructions for input and output using an index register.

In total, 458 new instructions were added to the 244 instructions of the 8080, and if you count those that were later recognized as almost official, you will also get about an additional fifty new instructions.

Most new commands are rather slow, but using them right can still make the code somewhat faster and significantly more compact. This particularly applies to the use of new 16-bit registers IX and IY, which can be used for new addressing modes. Interestingly, the index registers IX and IY appeared in the Z80 in order to attract the 6800 users to use the Z80 instead!

Many of the 8080's commands in the z80 became faster by one clock and this is a very noticeable acceleration. But the basic command for 16-bit arithmetic, the ADD instruction became slower by one clock, also commands LD SP,HL and EX (SP),HL, the increment and decrement with memory and 16-bit registers, as well as the input and output operations became slower. Therefore, codes of the 8080 are executed on the z80 maybe only slightly faster. However, if you implement the same algorithm for the 8080 and Z80, then the Z80 can be noticeably faster, for example, the calculation of the π number using a spigot algorithm for the Z80 turned out to be almost 10 percent faster than for the 8080.

The Z80 got support for a unique flag that is not found in any other system, this is the subtraction flag. It is only used by decimal correction command DAA, which can be used on the Z80 even after subtraction.

Another unique feature of the Z80 is its freely accessible memory regeneration register, it can, for example be used to generate random numbers.

The system of working with interrupts became more varied than that available on the 8080. With the z80 you can use both non-maskable interrupts and three modes to work with masked ones:

0. the same as for the 8080 – it requires an interrupt controller compatible with the 8080;
1. at a fixed address – this is the easiest, it does not require external circuit support;
2. the processor sets the highest byte of the interrupt handler, and the controller determines the lowest byte – this method requires hardware support of additional chips from Zilog.

Working with interrupts in the Z80 has other unique features. As we know, the Z80 like the 8080 does not save a processor status word during interrupts, but the Z80 nevertheless has as many as two unique commands for returning from interrupts. An instruction to return from a masked interrupt, RETI, works the same way as a normal return from a subroutine, but it should be noted as special by an external control circuitry and reset the interrupt setting. In other architectures (the 6502, x86,...), the interrupt handler code must explicitly specify controller reset commands, such as MOV AL,20H and OUT 20H,AL for the x86. However, work with the RETI instruction must be supported by external Zilog chips, and there are no such chips on well-known computers (in particular, the ZX Spectrum, MSX, Amstrad CPC/PCW, Tandy TRS-80 model 1/3/4). Another unique instruction is RETN to return from an unmasked interrupt, it also works like a normal return from a subroutine, but with a slight additional effect – it restores the masked interrupt flag that was saved at the start of an unmasked interrupt. This is information from official documentation, which cannot but raise questions. What, for example if a nested unmasked interrupt occurs? According to the latest data, the z80 works simpler and more logically, and there is therefore an error in the official documentation. The Z80 always restores the masked interrupt flag after exiting any interrupt with the RETN or RETI command, although this is not important for RETI. However, the processor doesn't save this flag when a non-maskable interrupt starts!

For reasons unknown to me, computers based on the Z80 usually did not use interrupt control circuits with full support for the capabilities of this processor, maybe because of the price. Although it turns out somehow unusual: there was a cheap processor and expensive support chips for it, as if Zilog aimed at producing only the Z80. There was the proprietary timer, the DMA, parallel and serial interfaces, and other similar support chips for the Z80, but all these chips were not used in popular computers. They were used only in some models of relatively rare and expensive office systems, for example, the Tandy TRS-80 model 2/12/16, ABC 800, Tatung Einstein, or Robotron 1715.

The Z80 has quite a few undocumented instructions, some of these instructions disappeared during the transition to CMOS technology, but those that have survived have become virtually standard and have been documented by some firms. Especially useful are instructions that allow you to work with individual bytes of the clumsy 16-bit registers IX and IY. In addition to undocumented instructions, the Z80 also has other undocumented properties, for example, two extra flags in the status register.

Of course the z80 even more so than the 8080 has the right to be called slightly 16-bit. The hypothetical bit index of the z80 is clearly slightly higher than for the 8080, but it is paradoxical that the ALU of the z80 is actually 4-bit! At the electronic level the z80 and 8080 are completely different chips.

The Z80's 16-bit operations were not fully complete, although this may have happened due to the need to maintain compatibility with the 8080. In particular, it is very inconvenient that the 16-bit increment and decrement do not change flags at all.

Of course, the Z80 can give a lot of other reasons for criticism. In addition to the empty instructions of type LD B,B inherited from the 8080, the Z80 introduced even more meaningless double instructions, i.e. the larger and slower clones of the available instructions which are the long LD HL,(nn) and LD (nn),HL, as well as RLC A, RRC A, RL A, RR A. The NEG instruction is a factual equivalent of the CPL and INC A instruction sequence. Also if we count the semi-official instructions, then such ugly doubles will be found even more. There is a rather strange error in the official documentation for input and output commands: it states that register C is used as an index, but actually the register BC is used. Perhaps this error was made intentionally, since the execution of block input or output instructions register B is used as a counter. Of course, if you use only 256 bytes for the ports, this error disappears by itself, but some systems for example Amstrad CPC/PCW, use all 64 KB of address space to access input and output ports and you won't be able to use such block instructions there. It is also interesting that even when using an 8-bit address in the IN and OUT operations the Z80 still generates a 16-bit address using the accumulator to set the high byte. This was used for example in the ZX81. In my opinion, too many instructions were added for input and output, most of them are rather redundant.

In the official documentation for the Z80, in addition to those noted, there are other inaccuracies. Enthusiasts have only recently learned the specifics of some Z80 instructions, such as OTIR/OTDR/INIR/INDR. The hidden MEMPTR and Q registers and an unusual reset option were revealed somewhat earlier.

Much has been written about the comparison of the performance of the z80 and 6502, as these processors were very widely used in the first mass computers. In this topic there are several difficult points and without understanding them it is very problematic to maintain objectivity. Due to the presence of a rather large number of registers, the z80 is naturally used at a frequency higher than memory. Therefore the z80 at 4 MHz can use the same memory as the 6502 or 6809 at 1.3 MHz. According to many experienced programmers who wrote code for both processors, at the same frequency the 6502 is on average about 2.4 to 2.6 times faster than the z80. The author of this material agrees with this. I just need to add that writing fast code for the z80 is very difficult, you need to repeatedly optimize the use of the registers, and to work with memory as much as possible using the stack. If you really try then in my opinion, you can reduce the difference between the z80 and 6502 to about 2.1 times. If you do not try and ignore timings, then you can even easily get the difference more than 4 times. In some individual cases the z80 can show very good timings. On the task of filling memory using the PUSH instruction the Z80 can be even slightly faster than the 6502, but this is at the cost of disabling interrupts. On copying memory blocks the z80 is only 1.5 times slower. It is especially impressive that in the division of the 32-bit divisible by the 16-bit divider the z80 is slower by only 1.6 times. By the way such a notable division was implemented by a programmer from Russia. The Z80 can show similar excellent results on other intensive 16-bit calculations when there are enough registers. Thus, we get that the ZX Spectrum with the z80 at 3.5 MHz is about 1.5 times faster than the C64 with the 6502 at 1 MHz. It should also be noted that some ticks in most systems with the z80 or 6502 are taken from the processor to circuits for generating the video signal. For example because of this the popular Amstrad CPC/PCW computers have the effective processor frequency of 3.2 MHz, not the full 4. On the 6502 systems you can usually turn off the screen for maximum processor performance. If we take as a basis the frequency of memory not the processor, it turns out that the z80 25-40% is faster than the 6502. The last result can be illustrated by the fact that with memory with a frequency of 2 MHz the z80 can operate at a frequency of up to 6 MHz, and the 6502 only up to 2 MHz.

It would also be interesting to compare the performance of the Z80 and 8088. Of course in general the 8088 is a more powerful processor, but in many important cases it is slower than the Z80. Consider the following table which shows some typical cases where the Z80 is faster. The correspondence between the registers is the same as in the standard program that converts the 8080 code to the 8086 code.

It can easily be noticed that the Z80 is faster on the 8080 instructions which set program counter or make a memory access. Especially noticeable is the advantage of the Z80 at executing far conditional jumps. With the 8088, the offset at conditional jumps is only one byte, so when you need a farther jump you have to write two commands. The Z80 does not have such a problem, there are always two bytes allocated for a jump, and therefore in such cases a conditional jump for the Z80 is much faster by 6 or 9 clock cycles. Almost all instructions using the HL register are performed in the Z80 a little faster, and this includes addition, subtraction, comparison, BIT and other logical operations. Although the Z80 and 8088 returns from an interrupt are architecturally very different, they carry identical functions. The RETI instruction of the Z80 is 30 clock cycles faster than IRET, and this is not counting the commands that the 8088 needs to execute to reset the interrupt controller. In the Z80, subroutine calls and returns can be conditional, which makes similar codes for the Z80 more compact and faster than for the 8088. Also of course emulating the EXX and EX commands for the additional set of registers, block i/o commands, or the RLD/RRD commands will take quite a long time on the 8088. In addition, the 8088 works with an instruction queue that requires 4 clock cycles for each byte of the instruction and this often adds clock cycles when executing a command, the Z80 does not have such a retard. However, the main advantage of the Z80 over the 8086/8088 is its faster memory access. On the Z80 this access takes 3 cycles, and on the 8086/88 it takes 4. But despite all this, the code for the 8088 is usually slightly faster than the code for the Z80 at the same frequencies. After all, the 8088 has a 16-bit ALU, more powerful addressing methods and instructions, and its registers are more versatile.

The Z80 was used in a very large number of computer systems. In the USA the Tandy TRS-80 was very popular – interestingly, that the HALT instruction causes the reset on these computers. In Europe it was the ZX Spectrum, and later the Amstrad CPC and PCW. Interestingly the Amstrad PCW computers maintained their importance until the mid-90's and massively and actively were used for their intended purpose until the late 90's. Japan and other countries produced quite successful around the world the MSX computers. Although it is still not entirely clear why good MSX computers could not get into the United States and many European countries. Other Z80-based computers were produced in Japan, notably the Sharp X1 and NEC's PC-6000, PC-6600, PC-8000 and PC-8800 series, which remained largely unknown outside that country. The rather popular C128 could also use the z80, but in this case the users were left in a rather embarrassing situation. This late 1985 release, the 8-bit computer with the z80, which officially clocked at 2 MHz, really only worked at 1.6 MHz under CP/M! It was slower even than the first systems of the mid-70's based on the 8080! The range of computers for using the operating system CP/M has at least three dozen fairly well-known systems. The Z80 was also used in the game consoles, Master System, Game Gear, Mega Drive, and others. The total number of the Z80-based systems produced is probably less than 100 million, which is less than the number of the 6502-based systems, but that's not counting calculators. In schools and universities in the United States, from the 90s to the present, almost all students are required to have a TI-83 calculator or one compatible with it! Therefore, taking into account calculators, it is possible that in the 21st century, the number of systems based on the Z80 surpassed the number for the 6502.

The fastest computer system known to me based on the Z80 is the BBC Micro which has 6 MHz second processor the TUBE's Z80B, which was produced from 1984. The processor in this system runs at full speed, as it is possible to say, "without brakes". Similar devices were produced for Apple ][ since 1979. Some such Z80-cards later used the Z80H at 8 MHz and even higher. Interestingly Microsoft in 1980 received the greatest revenue from the sale of such devices. We can also mention the Amstrad PcW16 produced since 1994, which uses the CMOS Z80 at a frequency of 16 MHz.

In Japan for the MSX TurboR systems (1990), the R800 processor was made compatible with the Z80. In the R800 they added hardware 16-bit multiplication with a 32-bit result. Although when multiplying a 16-bit constant, table multiplication with the table of 768 bytes is several clocks faster. There are opinions that the R800 is just a simplified Z800, running at four times the frequency of the bus which is about 7.16 MHz. So the R800 internal clock is about 28.64 MHz!

Zilog did work on improving the Z80 very inconsistently and extremely slowly. The first Z80 worked at frequencies up to 2.5 MHz, the Z80A which soon appeared had limiting frequency of 4 MHz. The latter processors became the basis for most popular computers using the Z80. The Z80B appeared by 1980 but was used relatively rarely, for example, in the mentioned second processor card for the BBC Micro or in the late (1989) computer Sam Coupé. The Z80H appeared by the mid-80's and could operate at frequencies up to 8 MHz, it was not used in well-known computers. Interestingly Zilog products had special traps on all chips for those who tried to make copies of them. For example the base Z80 had 9 traps and they, according to reviews of those who tried copying, slowed down the process for almost a year.

A deeper upgrade of the z80 was hampered by the desire of Zilog to create a 16-bit processor. In 1979, just after the 8086 but before the 68000, the Z8000, which was not compatible with the z80, was released. The Z8000 was used in about a dozen systems, usually for working with Unix variants. It was a very interesting processor with 16 16-bit registers, which could even be used as 4 64-bit registers! A memory management chip was made for the Z8000, which became available by 1980. For the x86 architecture, a processor with memory management capabilities became available only in 1982 and for the 68k only in 1984. However, in spite of good technical characteristics, the Z8000 was very limitedly used. IBM didn't even consider the Z8000 as a possible processor for the IBM PC because Zilog was funded by Exxon who were going to compete with IBM. Here we can also remember the strange revelations of Masatoshi Shima, a leading Zilog engineer, in which he claims that Zilog artificially lowered the frequency of the Z8000, so that it would not be faster than the 8086. So we can conclude that Zilog was not going to compete with Intel in the area of 16-bit processors. The Motorola 68000 is believed to have been slightly better than the Z8000 overall. However, one of the main advantages of the 68000 was the higher clock frequency... It may be assumed that the Z8000 was assigned the role of being in the shadow of the 8086, but the 68000 destroyed that niche. Perhaps due to the lack of success of the Z8000 Zilog became an Exxon subsidiary by 1980. There was also an attempt to create a competitive 32-bit processor. In 1986 the Z80000 appeared, compatible with the Z8000, which has never been used anywhere. Some circumstances, in particular very strange complaints from Zilog's team on excessive financing, allow us to think that maybe Zilog (as part of Exxon) for some obscure reason rather sabotaged their work.

One can wonder why Zilog abandoned its approach (which showed super-successful results with the Z80) namely, to make processors software-compatible with Intel processors, but better than them and at the same time completely different at the hardware level. Subsequently, this approach was successfully used by many companies, in particular AMD, Cyrix, VIA.

Creating a new processor based on the Z80 was postponed until 1985 when the Z800 was produced. However then the main efforts of Zilog were directed at the Z80000 and the Z800 was released in very few numbers. In 1986 after the failure of the Z80000 the Z280 was released, an insignificantly improved version of the Z800 (maybe it was just a rebranding). The Z800/Z280 in particular could work on the internal frequency several times higher than the bus frequency. This new idea brought a big success to the Intel 486DX2 and 486DX4 processors later. But perhaps because of poor performance the Z280 despite many technological innovations could use only relatively low clock frequencies, this processor also has not been used anywhere. It is considered that the Z280 roughly matched the capabilities of the Intel 80286, but was significantly at least 50% slower when using the same clock speed as used with the 80286. Perhaps if the Z280 had appeared 5 years earlier it could have been very successful.

The greatest success was achieved thanks to cooperation with the Japanese company Hitachi, which in 1985 released its super-Z80 (the HD64180) similar in capabilities with the Intel 80186. The HD64180 allowed the use of 512 KB of memory, added a dozen new instructions, but at the same time some almost standard undocumented Z80 instructions were not supported. This processor was used in some computer systems. Zilog received a license for the HD64180 and began to produce them with the marking Z64180. Zilog managed to slightly improve this processor in particular to add support for working with 1 MB of memory and released it by the end of 1986. This new processor was called the Z180 and became the basis for a family of processors and controllers with clock frequencies up to 33 MHz. It was used in some rare models of the MSX2 computers, but more as a controller. It is a curious coincidence that the Z280 and Z180 appeared in one year as was the case of their approximate counterparts the 80286 and 80186 four years before. In 1994 the 32-bit Z380 was made on the basis of the Z180, which retained compatibility with the Z80 and roughly corresponds to the capabilities of the Intel 80386 or Motorola 68020. In fact Zilog showed a lag behind competitors by almost 10 years. For the 21st century again on the basis of the Z180 the successful eZ80 controller-processors have been manufactured with timings almost like the 6502. They are used in various equipment in particular in network cards, DVD-drives, calculators, etc. A processor compatible with the 6502 and comparable to the eZ80 has not appeared. Perhaps simply because Zilog has always had better finances than WDC.

Many Z80 variants and clones were produced by many companies (Mostek – produced Z80 before Zilog itself, SGS-Thomson, Sharp, NEC, GoldStar/LG, National Semiconductor, ...) and in many countries around the world. Interestingly, the NEC μPD9002 processor, available since at least 1986, was used in top-of-the-line models of the popular PC-8800 computer at 8 MHz and was compatible not only with the Z80 but also with the Intel 8086. In the Eastern Bloc, the greatest success in cloning the Z80 was achieved in the GDR, where a clone of this processor has been produced since 1980. All the accompanying Z80 chips were also produced there. In Romania, they were able to make their own clone of the Z80 only by 1988. In the USSR this was done late, by 1991, and the processor was unusually named the T34, the same as the most mass-produced tank of the Second World War. Impressively, the GDR was even able to make a clone of the Z8000.

Edited by Richard BN