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Re: "word"

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"Rui Maciel" <rui.maciel@gmail.com> wrote in message 
news:k28pjl$ou7$1@speranza.aioe.org...
> BartC wrote:
>
>>> Hmm. That's a tough one. Can you name a computer with a 64 bit word? 
>>> Most
>>> of the 64 bit machines I know have a 32 bit word
>>
>> So what makes those 64-bit machines rather than 32?
>
> Other than marketing, the size of virtual address pointers.  One of the 
> main
> selling points of the AMD64 platform was how it didn't limited the virtual
> address space to 4GB.

AFAIK, AMD64 is genuine 64-bits. (And I'm not sure that addressing, virtual 
or otherwise, is a full 64-bits anyway, even if the address bits are 
contained within a 64-bit word. Even in 2012, 2^64 bytes of addressing would 
still be overkill, at least for local memory access.)

But using address-size I don't think is a useful measure, otherwise early 
8-bit microprocessors would be classed as 16-bits. (While many old N-bit 
mainframes would be downgraded because their address width was smaller!)

I would expect an N-bit machine to have an N-bit ALU and general registers 
at least.

-- 
Bartc 

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"word" bob <bob@coolfone.comze.com> - 2012-09-05 06:38 -0700
  Re: "word" "Dmitry A. Kazakov" <mailbox@dmitry-kazakov.de> - 2012-09-05 15:55 +0200
  Re: "word" Patricia Shanahan <pats@acm.org> - 2012-09-05 07:02 -0700
    Re: "word" Daniel Pitts <newsgroup.nospam@virtualinfinity.net> - 2012-09-05 09:34 -0700
      Re: "word" Patricia Shanahan <pats@acm.org> - 2012-09-05 10:56 -0700
    Re: "word" Anonymous <nobody@remailer.paranoici.org> - 2012-09-05 18:57 +0000
      Re: "word" Ben Bacarisse <ben.usenet@bsb.me.uk> - 2012-09-05 23:23 +0100
      Re: "word" "BartC" <bc@freeuk.com> - 2012-09-05 23:43 +0100
        Re: "word" Rui Maciel <rui.maciel@gmail.com> - 2012-09-06 01:09 +0100
          Re: "word" Robert Wessel <robertwessel2@yahoo.com> - 2012-09-05 22:03 -0500
          Re: "word" "BartC" <bc@freeuk.com> - 2012-09-06 11:02 +0100
            Re: "word" Robert Wessel <robertwessel2@yahoo.com> - 2012-09-06 11:31 -0500
      Re: "word" Robert Wessel <robertwessel2@yahoo.com> - 2012-09-05 21:38 -0500
      Re: "word" Robin Vowels <robin.vowels@gmail.com> - 2012-09-10 05:40 -0700
    Re: "word" rossum <rossum48@coldmail.com> - 2012-09-06 11:30 +0100
  Re: "word" Ben Bacarisse <ben.usenet@bsb.me.uk> - 2012-09-05 21:40 +0100
    Re: "word" Jongware <jongware@no-spam.plz> - 2012-09-07 16:26 +0200
      Re: "word" Robin Vowels <robin.vowels@gmail.com> - 2012-09-11 03:34 -0700

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