The fixed point TI dsp chips always had a long int that was 48. Intel had 84 bit floating point registers before simd registers took over. And the pdp-11... Pow

The fixed point TI dsp chips always had a long int that was 48. Intel had 84 bit floating point registers before simd registers took over. And the pdp-11... Powers of two aren't as ubiquitous as it seems. If anything, the hardware uses whatever sizes it wants and that gets abstracted from the rest of the world by compilers and libraries.