Carlos Rodrigues 🪣 on Nostr: As a kid, I didn't understand what exactly 8-bit vs. 16-bit vs. 32-bit meant, but I ...

As a kid, I didn't understand what exactly 8-bit vs. 16-bit vs. 32-bit meant, but I got the message that more bits were better.

As an adult, I understand those labels were arbitrary at best, if not misleading.

Today we kind of settled on address size – e.g. we take x86_64 to be 64-bit because it uses 64-bit addresses (even though its physical address width is less than that).

In the past, it might have been register size, data bus width, address bus width, ... 🤷‍♂️

1/4 🧵

#retrocomputing #cpu