2 ms·
Author here. It's true that you'd need one more bit to represent a bit position in a word, like for shifts, but we're already vastly over-provisioned; even in 6
by pavpanchekha 1y ago
Author here. It's true that you'd need one more bit to represent a bit position in a word, like for shifts, but we're already vastly over-provisioned; even in 64-bit registers we're only using six of eight bits. (Plus, in a lot of places we'd have that extra bit around!)
Some hardware circuits are a bit nicer with power-of-two sizes but I don't think it's a huge difference, and hardware has to include weird stuff like 24-bit and 53-bit multipliers for floating-point anyway (which in this alternate world would be probably 28-bit and 60-bit?). Not sure a few extra gates would be a dealbreaker.
- DrNosferatu 1y ago- Why not 12 bits?
- adastra22 1y agoWhy not 10? 1 byte ~= 1k values. Nice easy conversions.
- devoutsalsa 1y agoI used to use a 32 bit bite! Then I has my wisdom teeth removed, and now I have a 28 bit bite.
- seanhunter 1y agoWeird bytelengths were very much the norm in early computing but noone (seemingly) ever mass-produced a 10 bit computer[1]. In the first 3⁄4 of the 20th century, n is often 12, 18, 24, 30, 36, 48 or 60. In the last 1⁄3 of the 20th century, n is often 8, 16, or 32, and in the 21st century, n is often 16, 32 or 64, but other sizes have been used (including 6, 39, 128). [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_instruction_set_architectures https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_instruction_set_...
- nicman23 1y agohehe a bit nicer
- 15155 1y ago> Some hardware circuits are a bit nicer with power-of-two sizes Basically all FIFOs or addressable memory works far nicer with power-of-two sizes.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]