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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 22nd, 2023

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  • We do, depending on how you count it.

    There’s two major widths in a processor. The data register width and the address bus width, but even that is not the whole story. If you go back to a processor like the 68000, the classic 16-bit processor, it has:

    • 32-bit data registers
    • 16- bit ALU
    • 16-bit data bus
    • 32-bit address registers
    • 24-bit address bus

    Some people called it a 16/32 bit processor, but really it was the 16-bit ALU that classified it as 16-bits.

    If you look at a Zen 4 core it has:

    • 64-bit data registers
    • 512-bit AVX data registers
    • 6 x 64-bit integer ALUs
    • 4 x 256-bit AVX ALUs
    • 2 x 128-bit data bus to DDR5 (dual edge 64-bit)
    • ~40-bits of addressable physical RAM

    So, what do you want to call this processor?

    64-bit (integer width), 128-bit (physical data bus width), 256-bit (widest ALU) or 512-bit (widest register width)? Do you want to multiply those numbers up by the number of ALUs in a core? …by the number of cores on a piece of silicon?

    Me, I’d say Zen4 was a 256-bit core, but you could argue any of the above numbers.

    Basically, it’s a measurement that lost all meaning so people stopped using it.


  • We can, but it’s awkward to do so. By having everything work with powers of 2 you don’t need to have everything the same size, but can still pack things in memory efficiently.

    If your registers were 48bits long, you can use it to store 6 bytes, or 3 short ints, but only one int with 16-bits going unused. If they are powers of two in size, you can always fit smaller things in them with no wasted space.


  • I object to the British label.

    Prakash Hinduja is Indian born Swiss. His brother S.P Hinduja was Indian born British and the billionaire head on the Hinduja company until his death last year. The company itself is Indian, so the British connection died last year and was somebody not involved in the case. This was a Swiss trial of a swiss family.

    Plus… Let’s face it. People with this level of money choose their nationality based on financial or business reasons. Wherever gives them the best tax break.