3 ms·
> Of the various claims that something is X-bit I think the most credible is the size of the address space as opposed to the size of the ALU. But that would ma
by duskwuff 5y ago
> Of the various claims that something is X-bit I think the most credible is the size of the address space as opposed to the size of the ALU.
But that would make the MOS 6502 a 16-bit processor, and the Intel 8088 20-bit (!) -- neither of which are consistent with common usage. (They're generally considered 8-bit and 16-bit, respectively.)
I'd stick with "the size of a general-purpose register". That neatly excludes special-purpose registers from consideration, like 256/512-bit AVX registers in x86_64 systems and the 16-bit program counter in most 8-bit CPUs.