The 10-year-newer microcoded Z180 design could initially afford more "chip area", permitting a slightly more efficient implementation (using a wider ALU, among other things); similar things can be said for the Z800, Z280, and Z380. However, it was not until the fully pipelined eZ80 was launched in 2001 that those instructions finally became approximately as cycle-efficient as it is technically possible to make them, i.e. given the Z80 encodings combined with the capability to do an 8-bit read or write every clock cycle.