4 ms·
I presume he's referring to the address space? It's a bit confusing, indeed.
by royjacobs 8y ago
I presume he's referring to the address space? It's a bit confusing, indeed.
- antirez 8y agoSorry you read the comment one second before I updated it, I clarified how AFAIK addressing 16 bits of memory does not make it a 16 bit processor.
- Drakim 8y agoIndeed, the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) can also address 16 bits of memory and is one of the most famous "8 bit systems" around.
- vidarh 8y agoIn fact the NES uses a 6502-derived core (the Ricoh 2A03/2A07 CPUs contain a licensed 6502 core with some minor tweaks)
- royjacobs 8y agoRight :) I think when the Atari Jaguar was released they used the same kind of logic to market it as a 64-bit system since technically some part of it was using 64-bit processing, but the CPUs were still 32-bit. It's just nitpicking though, I thoroughly enjoy Fabien's writing and I can highly recommend the couple of books he's written about reverse engineering Id Software games. On HN people seem to confuse "hacking" with "growth hacking" a lot of times, and Fabien's writing is thankfully on the right side of that fence.
- anentropic 8y agoand the "ST" in Atari ST stood for "sixteen/thirty-two" referring to the 16-bit 68000 processor and ... 32-bit something else, I forget :)
- vidarh 8y agoThe 68000 CPU has a 32-bit address space [1], 32-bit internal data bus, and 32-bit registers, but a 16-bit external data bus and 16-bit ALU, so it's sometimes seen as a bit of a hybrid and sometimes referred to as a 16/32 bit CPU. [1] but only 24 address lines, which led to "interesting" bugs when people had written code that used the top byte of addresses for other purposes and their code was then run on a 68020 or higher.