Always strive to learn something useful. --Sophocles

The legend? The Zilog Z80 CPU.

Talk about a heck of a run! Could you imagine Intel still making Pentium II's today? But that Z80 has kept truckin' along for almost five decades! Talk about an incredible design. While it was a general purpose CPU like those made by Intel and AMD and others today, its low power consumption and well-understood programming and foibles made it very popular for embedded device controllers. I told a friend of mine who thinks he's a tech geek and holds a degree in EE, and he'd never heard of it! He's slightly younger than me, but not that much, he was never a generalist. The Z80 was a backbone for the C/PM and M/PM operating system and S100 bus architecture, which was what computing was done on before in the '70s and '80s until the IBM PC and Mac began revolutionizing and bringing it all to the rest of us.

From the Techspot article: "Federico Faggin, an Intel engineer, founded Zilog in 1974 after his work on the Intel 4004, the first 4-bit CPU. The Zilog Z80 was then released in July 1976, conceived as a software-compatible "extension" and enhancement of the Intel 8080 processor.

Developed by a team of just 12 people, the Z80 saw remarkable success, leading Zilog to establish its own chip manufacturing plants and expand to over a thousand employees within two years. Like its Intel counterpart, the Z80 was originally designed for embedded systems but went on to become a significant milestone in gaming hardware from the 1970s to the mid-1980s."

and

"Several home computers and gaming consoles were built around the capabilities of the Z80, including Sega's Master System and SG-1000, and Nintendo's Game Boy and Game Boy Color. Many classic arcade games also used the Z80, including the original version of Pac-Man. Additionally, the 8-bit processor was common in military applications, musical synthesizers like the Roland Jupiter-8, and various other electronic devices."

So pour one out - but not on! - the Z80.

While the Z80 is going away, its legacy lives on in the eZ80 and newer iterations of the classic chip.

https://www.techspot.com/news/102684-zilog-discontinuing-z80-microprocessor-after-almost-50-years.html

https://hardware.slashdot.org/story/24/04/20/1916203/the-legendary-zilog-z80-cpu-is-being-discontinued-after-nearly-50-years

To hell with those decadent Westerners and their XBoxes and PlayStations and their LGBTQ propaganda! We're going to go with solid Russian craftsmanship and story-telling!

Now, I have absolutely no doubt that Russian game developers could create some truly compelling stories. Every nation has great story-tellers. And there's no doubt that they have great programmers, though far too many are involved in cybercrime. I think their goal of producing such a console by a '26-'27 deadline is perhaps overly ambitious, but hey, what do I know?

https://gamerant.com/russia-gaming-consoles/

The Slashdot comments are amusing:
https://games.slashdot.org/story/24/03/29/2244215/russia-is-making-its-own-gaming-consoles


Oh! I know what I know! Russian chip foundries are foundering with a chip packaging defect rate of 50%! And that's PACKAGING the chips, not MAKING them. The Chinese are making the chips, sending them to Russia for PACKAGING. So the Russians are receiving discs (I assume) that contain hundreds of chips that have to be precisely cut up, then packaged into housings with leads attached for later integration into circuit boards and such for use in various electronic devices.

Except they can't reliably, in large batches. Apparently they can do small batches okay, but large batches are beyond their ability.

The problem seems to be quality control, calibration of the devices, and workforce skill set.

Clearly first-world problems.

Oh, I forgot. Russia isn't a first-world nation. Except they have nukes, and a seemingly nutso war-monger leader. There are lots of brilliant scientists and engineers in Russia, and I feel sorry for them living in such constraints. We've had several Russian astronomers who've worked at the observatory, and I've worked with Russian programmers before. Brilliant people, once you figure out how to work with the language barriers.

This is why I mourned the turn they took when the nutjob former KGB station chief became the leader. I knew he'd never let go. They had a chance of turning around Russia when the USSR fell apart, they had a chance of becoming a free nation and elevating themselves, but then the criminal class took over and it became a kleptocracy, and it's now a mess.

I really can't see things improving until there's another October Revolution and the people literally seize the state again, which will be a massive bloodbath. Maybe they can start over, maybe the criminal class will simply seize power again.

It's a little unclear as to whether these chips are strictly consumer-grade or intended possibly for military use. A lot of military applications don't need anything much more sophisticated than an 8088, but when you're talking drones or night vision goggles, you're needing much later chips and packaging.

https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/cpus/half-of-russian-made-chips-are-defective-baikal-struggles-to-meet-russias-demand