🚀 go-pugleaf

These words of wisdom came from Peter Payne (leto2@gol1.gol.com):
: Dan Pop <Dan.Pop@mail.cern.ch> wrote:

: > The size of the data bus is pretty irrelevant to the bitness of a processor.
: > The sizes of the general purpose registers _and_ the ALU are the important
: > factors.  This is what makes the 8088 a 16-bit cpu, the 386SX and the
: > Pentium 32-bit cpu's and the 68000 so difficult to define :-)

: What, in physical terms, is a bus and how would a 32-bit bus look
: differently from a 16-bit one?

It's effectively the number of connections to the processor for that
function... ie, a 16bit data bus is a collection of 16 wires for carrying
data... ie, the processor can communicate 16 bits simultaneously.  The
size of the address bus dictates how much memory the processor can address
(access) without bank switching techniques (where memory is 'moved' by
hardware so the cpu can 'see' it)

Ie, a 32 bit cpu can perform calculations on all 32bits of a 32 bit number
simultaneously (as opposed to performing 2 calculations to achieve it..),
but if it has a 16 bit data bus then it will require 2 operations to read
that number (or write it) from (to) memory (or any other device).

--
Dave Reader                        "What I've felt,
D.A.Reader@Bradford.ac.uk           What I've known,
                                    Never shined through in what I've shown.."
Jumper.mcc.ac.uk 3214                                              - Metallica