15 Sep
2016
15 Sep
'16
5:09 p.m.
On Sep 15, 2016, at 5:57 PM, Toby Thain <toby at
telegraphics.com.au> wrote:
On 2016-09-15 2:38 PM, Noel Chiappa wrote:
GPR width, being the visible programmer model, is the most common and convenient
definition of "architecture" I've come across. But there's no reason we
can't just say the *visible* architecture is 32 bit (which it is), but the
"internal" architecture is sort of 16.
So would you call a PDP-8/S a one bit machine? I suppose you could, but that seems rather
odd.
paul
From:
Chuck Guzis
Call it anything you want, but we know what
Motorola called it.
The _first implementation_ may have been 16-bit, but I am in no doubt
whatsover (having written a lot of assembler code for the 68K family)
that the _architecture_ was 32-bit:
- 32-bit registers
- many operations (arithmetical, logical, etc) defined for that length
- 32-bit addresses