Re: Keeping other stuff with addresses (was: What is an N-bit machine?)

According to Anton Ertl <anton@mips.complang.tuwien.ac.at>:

These days I'd say the relevant N is the size of arithmetic
registers but a lot of marketers appear to disagree with me. 

The widest arithmetic registers on AMD64 with AVX-512 are the ZMM
registers with 512 bits each.  Sure, they are used for arithmetic on a
sequence of individually narrower data, but the registers have 512
bits nonetheless.

Jeez, who knew you were a chip salesman.

I meant the main registers, for some straightforward version of main.
You are of course correct that there are special purpose registers
that are much wider but I don't think it's all that hard to see which
ones I meant.

Everyone agreed that all the models of S/360 were 32 bit machines, but the
implementations ranged from 8 bits for the /25 and /30 to 64 bits for
the /75.  I don't think it's very useful to argue about whether the various
models of 360 were 8, 16, 32, or 64 bit machines.

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