Re: What is an N-bit machine?

According to Stephen Fuld  <sfuld@alumni.cmu.edu.invalid>:

a flag, 0 meant 24 bit addressing, 1 meant 31 bit addressing. That worked
reasonably well although they came up with yet more kludges to let programs
switch among multiple 31-bit address spaces.

>
Was ESA one of those kludges?

I'd say that was the main kludge, with primary and secondary address
spaces and address registers that worked sort of like segment
registers paired with the address in each regular register.

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

>
I tend to agree with you, with the caveat, as Mitch pointed out, of SIMD
registers.  But I suspect the term N-bit machine, will soon be a
historic relic, as most architectures have converged on 64 bit
arithmetic registers, and with the growth of address spaces seeming to
slow down, it will be a long time before anyone goes to 128 bit
(non-SIMD) registers.

I get the impression that we will have 32 bit architectures for a very
long time, since they are smaller and cheaper to implement than 64 bit
and for a lot of embedded applications they are more than adequate.
Examples are ARM Cortex-R4 and -R5, high performance 32 bit realtime
chips.

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