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From: David Brown <david.brown@hesbynett.no>
Newsgroups: comp.lang.c
Subject: Re: The integral type 'byte' (was Re: Suggested method for returning
 a string from a C program?)
Date: Thu, 27 Mar 2025 10:54:04 +0100
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On 27/03/2025 02:33, bart wrote:
> On 27/03/2025 01:10, Waldek Hebisch wrote:
>> bart <bc@freeuk.com> wrote:
>>> On 26/03/2025 18:09, Janis Papanagnou wrote:
>>>
>>>> , primitive CPU architectures,
>>>
>>> 8-bit architectures were fine, just a bit short of registers and with
>>> limitation instruction sets. But that is to be expected with only 27,000
>>> transistors on a chip or whatever it was for Z80.
>>
>> All sources that I found say that Z80 is about 8000 transistors.
>> You probably took number from 8086 which was climed to have 27000
>> transitors.
> 
> OK, then with 8000 it makes the capabilities even more remarkable. 
> Current processors have billions of transistors.
> 

Most of the bulk of current processors are arrays or repetitions - 
caches, arrays of registers, etc.  The "interesting" bits are orders of 
magnitude smaller than the chip as a whole.

But I am always impressed by how much older designs managed to do with 
so few transistors - even if Wikipedia says 8500 transistors rather than 
8000, and even though the logic families of such systems used fewer 
transistors per gate than modern CMOS.

The software on these early home computers was equally impressive in the 
tricks used to fit so much into such small spaces.  I've seen things 
like overlaps between character data, other tables, and code, to squeeze 
out a few more bytes.

(I've done a little of this myself in assembly for old brain-dead 
microcontroller architectures, though nothing close to the level 
achieved by the folks behind systems like the ZX 81.)