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From: BILLW@SU-SCORE.ARPA (William Chops Westfield)
Newsgroups: net.micro
Subject: Nec V2 vs 8088
Message-ID: <1497@brl-tgr.ARPA>
Date: Sat, 14-Sep-85 07:17:36 EDT
Article-I.D.: brl-tgr.1497
Posted: Sat Sep 14 07:17:36 1985
Date-Received: Tue, 17-Sep-85 05:13:56 EDT
Sender: news@brl-tgr.ARPA
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>From: tweten@AMES-NAS.ARPA (Dave Tweten)
>	:
>	:
>I don't presume to be an engineering law expert, but by no strech of my
>imagination can I conceive to the V20 being an 8088 carbon copy, either
>legal or illegal.

Does Intel claim the the V20 is a ripoff of the 8088, or a ripoff of
the 80188?  I think that the 80186 familly includes many improvments
"similar" to those included in the NEC v20.

Legally, there is the question of whether microcode CAN be copyrigthed
(I would say yes), and whether Intel's microcode WAS copyrighted (I
doubt it.  I don't think anyone copyrights their microcode - It is
normally too dependent on the underlying hardware to matter).  Regardless
of whether it was illegal, Im pretty sure we all agree that NEC was
immoral if indeed they actually stole the microcode.

>	:
>	:
>  .  NEC claims to use a separate address resolution unit on the chip,
>     instead of using the arithmetic unit.  Their effective address
>     calculation time is two cycles for any mode.  Intel's ranges from
>     5 to 12, depending on mode.

This sound misleading - Don't the quoted Intel timings include the
time needed to fetch the offsets (if any) from the instruction steam?
A more realistic comparison is probably V20: 2-10 cycles, 8088: 5 to 16
cycles (adding the extra 4 cycle for word offsets in 8 bit buses).
Does anyone know if stack operations and interupt response is improved?

>	:
>In summary, it appears to me that if the V20 is a "pirate" 8088, then
>the Z-80 was a "pirate" 8080.  Is our chauvinism showing?

Somewhat.  There is certainly a tradition for getting mad at companies
who reproduce your products, foriegn or not.  DEC sued (and lost) Foonly
over the implementation of PDP10 sytle byte operations, for example.

BillW
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