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Is this a clone or an original?

With that datecode, it should have been a white ceramic package, and the logo is wrong. As Chuck said, it's most likely fake. I won't buy old ICs from China that aren't guaranteed to be real anymore.
 
I wonder what it is, if it isn't a Z80.. I bought a mobile 266mhz Pentium turned into a desktop chip from China - looked like it wouldn't even power up - lots of package damage that I didn't notice until after paying - but it worked great at 300mhz. ;D Personally I would just get it - but my experience is relegated to x86. On an x86 chip the worst that could happen is it would be an older or newer or repackaged chip, which would just make it all the more interesting - they don't sell you a 6502 and label it an 8088, there's just no reason. I don't see why they'd sell something else as a Z80 - are they expensive typically for whatever reason?
 
Raven said:
they don't sell you a 6502 and label it an 8088, there's just no reason. I don't see why they'd sell something else as a Z80 - are they expensive typically for whatever reason?
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Actually, there's been a lot of exactly that sort of thing happening, for a long time. Fake/counterfeit components are encountered fairly regularly (happened to SparkFun pretty recently). A few years ago, a lot of manufacturers (Intel and Apple among them) experienced unusually high failure rates of Nichicon capacitors in some of their equipment...counterfeit components were largely to blame there. I'd assume the recent boom in vintage IC prices has inspired counterfeiters to relabel correct-looking packages with desirable names and numbers. Do an eBay search for 4004 or 8008 processors, and see how many are coming from China as "untested" or "for display purposes only."

EDIT: It has to be a counterfeit of some nature...there's no Z8400 number, and a chip of that date would have had one.
 
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You can never be sure of anything with fakes. It could be a Z80, it could be something else. It could even just be a block of ceramic with nothing inside.
 
Fake or not, I'm just wondering how much of a market is still left here in the U.S. for a Z-80. Personally, I don't think I'd be putting very many beans on the table if my business was dependant on dealing fake Z-80's. BTW, who the heck wants a Z-80 when you can still get a V20-10 for less than 20 bucks? Now if you were rebadging the new 1055t as a 1090t, you might have something going for yourself.
 
Agent Orange said:
BTW, who the heck wants a Z-80 when you can still get a V20-10 for less than 20 bucks?
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The Z80 is still used extensively. Not in home computers any more, but it pops up all over the place in industrial computers and embedded systems, plus buried inside consumer electronic like printers, or faxes. Zilog still sells millions of them.
 
Agent Orange said:
Fake or not, I'm just wondering how much of a market is still left here in the U.S. for a Z-80. Personally, I don't think I'd be putting very many beans on the table if my business was dependant on dealing fake Z-80's. BTW, who the heck wants a Z-80 when you can still get a V20-10 for less than 20 bucks? Now if you were rebadging the new 1055t as a 1090t, you might have something going for yourself.
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The 40-pin Z80-CPU itself? I don't know. But the Z80 instruction set lives on in quite a number of microcontrollers, including USB-capable ones. ISTR that some versions of the Zilog eZ80 uC's will tick along at 50MHz and have 32-bit registers and memory management.

Far from dead. The Z80 instruction set lives on, after a fasion, in Rabbit Semi's chips as well (there are heavy modifications to the set to remove some "unnecessary" instructions).

I suppose one could make an argument that the Intel 8008 instruction set still lives on in the latest x86 chips as well.
 
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