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I am simplifying a lot since there were much more chips involved... but 3500 transistors to have countless hours of fun to play NES games really puts things into perspective

My 5090 has 92 billion transistors (I dont say they dont bring fun)

by Lio8 hours ago|

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> If the Zilog engineers would have been free to design their own ISA I'm sure they would have been able to come up with a much more elegant design.

That's an interesting idea. They were previously part of the team that designed the 8080 so they must have been very familiar with the ISA and the design philosophy.

I'm sure they'd be able to come up with improvements but how much more elegant it would have been is hard to say.

by II2II4 hours ago|

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Making it even harder to say: the 8080 was based on the 8008. Even though the 8080 was based on the same instruction set as the 8008, it wasn't binary compatible. I assume that means the instruction encoding was different, which means those engineers probably did as much as the could to clean things up while designing the 8080.

Of course, the 8008's origins (along with the completely unrelated 4004) were outside of Intel. They were hired to design custom ICs. The 8008's architecture was dictated by a CTC terminal. While Intel designed the 4004, it was only intended to be used in calculators. Intel, and its engineers, probably put relatively little thought into microprocessor architecture until the 8080.

by garaetjjte4 hours ago|

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They did eventually design their own clean-sheet instruction set for Z8000.

by dosisking10 hours ago|

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> If the Zilog engineers would have been free to design their own ISA I'm sure they would have been able to come up with a much more elegant design.

Since Zilog was founded by former Intel engineers, they were probably the ones who helped design the 8080 in the first place?