6 May
2010
6 May
'10
10:41 a.m.
For those of us that don't know any better
(I'm a little wiser now, having
aka 'marketroids' ?
worked with the Motorola 68000 CPU) . It's a bit
like the days when games
consoles had 16-bit, 32-bit etc. stamped on their beautiful plastic case. It
That;s another meaningless number in a lot of cases. Is the Philips P850
8 bit (width of the ALU and most intenral data paths) or 16 bit (how it
appears to the machine code programmer -- an 'add' instruction adds 2 16
bits numbers, and uses the ALU twice, onve for each byte). Is the IBM PC
8 bit (width of the data bus) or 16 bit?
I have a machine here that I could justify any of the following numbers
of bits for :
1 (Bit serial ALU for binary operations)
3 (Physical width of user program memory)
4 (width of the ALU for BCD operations)
6 (logical width of user program memory)
8 (physical width of user data memory, and I/O bus)
16 (logical witdh of user data memory, also size of most processor
registers).
-tony