🚀 go-pugleaf

John Summerfield wrote:
> 
> In <5s0qkp$mut$1@news1.exit109.com>, dcinege@fuckthejunkmailers.org (Dave Cinege) writes:
> 
> ]No it was not. No such thing as 32-bit in the user market when it came out.
> ]The 68020 was not even thought of.
> 
> All the 68000 series is 32-bit internally. The native word size is 32-bit
>     regardless of the bus capacity,
> 
> Just the same as the IBM S/370 family has always been 32-bit even thow
>     low-end models had a 16-bit data bus (and high-end models a 64-bit
>     data bus).
> 
> Similarly the 8086 and 8088 chips are bot 16-bit even though the 8088 has
>     an eight bit data bus: the only ways for software to distinguish
>     between these two processors or by testing timing dependence by
>     testing the length of the instruction fetch queue (by modifying an
>     instruction that would be fetched by an 8086 but not by an 8088).
> 

What is usually overlooked is that there are two completely
different references to 16/32 bits.  One is bus width, which
affects processor to memory bandwidth.

The other one, which is most commonly meant when talking about
16/32 bit systems, such as "OS/2 is a 32 bit OS," refers to the
segment/offset vs. flat memory model.  16 bit means segment/offset
and 32 bit means flat memory.

One should be careful to define which one is being discussed.

Alan

There are no capital letters in my email address.