Comment by JVIDEL
6 hours ago
So is this just for hobbyists or it has any, say, industrial applications? are there any machines still running on a Z80?
6 hours ago
So is this just for hobbyists or it has any, say, industrial applications? are there any machines still running on a Z80?
Just for hobbyists. It's very much over-engineered as a simple Z80 cpu drop-in replacement.
That's not to say I couldn't imagine that someone, somewhere, wakes up to an alert one day that some control board has failed, and it's _just_ the CPU, and the spare parts bin for out-of-production components got water in it and is ruined, and the company is losing millions per hour the system is down. I just don't think that'll be a common story. With full faith in humanity I like to imagine instead that the people responsible for such systems have planned for full control board replacements to be available for use comfortably before unavailability of the Z80 risks a significant outage due to component failure.
Approximately every old digital technology is still in use industrially.
The TI-84+ graphing calculator is still popular and a current model and it is Z80 based. (Though I doubt you'll find a DIP40 socket in one for a swap.)
The TI-84+ uses a TI REF 84PLUSB (or variant) ASIC that has a Z80-compatible core in it, not a Zilog Z80, and, as you say, definitely not a DIP40 part.
See the ASIC here, in what looks to me like a QFP-144 package: https://guide-images.cdn.ifixit.com/igi/e25cVO2avPxiMoXl.hug...
The CE also uses an ASIC, but with an eZ80 core instead.