Why did early TI calculators, especially the TI-8x series, use the Z80?
Especially when considering the increased price.īe serious, would you - and more important millions of parents - have been willing to pay like triple the price, just to have a different CPU, one the user (normally) never sees? For a speed increase 99.99% of all users never experience in real life? The main advantage of 16 (or 32) bit processors wasn't about speed, but addressable memory.Īnd floating point arithmetic could be implemented with reasonable efficiency even with no FPU. Not to mention that a 68000 wasn't much faster than a Z80 with comparable technology. Producing a square root after 1/1000 second instead of 1/100 second (or a two seconds) doesn't matter for the user, does it? Which doesn't make a big difference in real life application. Other contemporary processors such as the 68k were fully capable of integer multiplication and division A Z80 is more than capable to do several hundred up to a few thousand flotingpoint operations per second - way more than the average calculator user ever can use. Like any other device a pocket calculator is about sufficient speed, not maximum speed. Not more than CPUs used in calculators before.
The Z80 is notoriously limited when it comes to mathematical calculators.
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