Zilog Z380

The Z380 is a Zilog 16/32-bit processor from 1994. It's Z80 compatible, but it was released much later than its competitors (the Intel 386 and Motorola 68000) and as a result was never able to gain any significant market leverage. On the other hand, the newer and faster eZ80 family has been more successful recently.

The chip supports 16-bit processing with a clock speed of up to 20MHz.

As it stems from the Z180 design, it's a simpler, less efficient design and incompatible with Zilog's previous generation, the Z280, with a lot less features:

  • No pipeline
  • No memory protection
  • Lacks the I/O trap feature
  • No built-in cache
  • Much simpler MMU
  • Minimal of 4 clocks/instruction, against 1 (cache hit) or 2 (cache miss) on the Z280.