From: Guy Sotomayor Jr

Why? What does the width of the ALU have to do with the "bitness" of the architecture? If the programmer's view is 8-bits .., what does it matter (other than performance) what the width of the internal data paths or ALU are? It's interesting from an implementation point of view but not really anything else.

From: Fred Cisin

There are more than a hundred different parameters involved. There is no definitive agreement as to which parameter is to be used for the classification, nor even which parameterS. ... a product that has one classification by one parameter, and a different classification by another parameter, there will be disputed classifications, since different parameters are more or less important to each viewer.