On Tue, 30 Sep 2003 13:08:38 +0000, Tony Hill wrote:

On Tue, 30 Sep 2003 07:44:00 GMT, "Wes Newell"
wrote:
On Mon, 29 Sep 2003 22:07:35 +0000, Tony Hill wrote:

The article specifically goes on to say "Sure, AMD's chips are not
true 64-bit in the same sense that the 386sx was not true 32-bit."
WTF?! What is this guy smoking! The 386SX was very much a 32-bit
processor, it just happened to be saddled by a 16-bit data bus. The
Athlon64 and Opteron are in EVERY sense of the word a 64-bit
processor. No ifs, ands or buts about it.

I just want to make this very clear. Before Intel/Ibm marketing got into
the picture, cpu's bit size was rated by the data bus.

Why in the hell would anyone do that?!?! That's about the dumbest way I
can think of to compare the bit-ness of a CPU!

Because it made sense. Dive into the history of processors and you'll
understand why. It was the bottleneck of the system. The cpu can't process
data it doesn't have yet. That's why it went from a 4bit beginning to what
it is today. Look at all the ways they speed this up with caches. Disable
all your cpu caches and watch the most powerful cpu come to a crawl
running over the data bus. A hybrid like the 8088 had to make 2 complete
data cycles to get the same data a true 16bit cpu did in 1. But all this
has become skewed by the marketing types. Bus speeds have always been
measured in clock cycles. Now the marketing idiots decided to define the
bus by the data rate, but using the clock speed unit of measure (MHz)
instead of the data rate unit of measure (Bps, bps). Why? Simple because
it looks better, and the majority of the people don't know it's just BS.

So the Pentium was a 64-bit processor, as are all current PC chips
except for the Athlon64, which is now a... umm.. what do you call the
Athlon64 which doesn't have a data bus? A 0-bit processor? Or perhaps
it's a dual-processor 16-bit unidirectional chip because it has two
16-bit unidirectional hypertransport links? What the heck does that
make the Opteron then?

To be honest, I haven't looked at the architecture that much. From what I
can tell, the data comes across the HTL, which is 72 bits wide. with the
Opteron/64FX having 2 of them for 144bits. Thus the much improved
throughput of data to the core, and also why the regular A64 is quite a
bit slower than the FX/Opteron series.

Good thing IBM has their 1024 bit chips these days.

Original data
sheets from Intel show the 8088 as an 8 bit cpu, even though it had
16bit registers. The Motorola 68000 was also designated as a 16bit cpu
even though it had 32bit registers. Once marketing got into the picture
everything changes.

Sounds to me more like a question of people finally getting smacked over
the head with a clue. Who the hell cares what the width of the data bus
is?

Answered above.

That's why all the confusion on the P4/Athlon FSB
speeds. Just keep letting them get away with this crap and take it.
Pretty soon you won't know wtf you're buying. IFAIC, the 386SX was the
worst piece of **** ever produced and I know many of people that bought
them thinking they were buying 386 speeds when what they got was really
286 speeds.

Back in the day when I was still a young'un living at home, my parents
had a 386SX. Yes, it had it's ups and it's downs, and in retrospect we
probably would have been better off spending a bit more for a 386DX, but
the thing worked and was a hell of a lot faster than the XT it replaced.

Of course it was faster. The XT had an 8 bit data bus and the SX had a
16bit data bus.:-)

The chip was definitely a 32-bit chip though, it ran pretty much all
32-bit software I threw at it, albeit sometimes at rather slow speeds. I
remember being HUGELY disappointed when Doom came out and the
performance stank on this PC.

It was a 32bit cpu only in the sense that that's what Intel designated it.
It was never considered a true 32bit cpu back then.

A bit of a rip-off? Perhaps. The worst piece of **** ever produced? I
think that might be stretching it. There's been a LOT of **** produced
over the years!

True.:-)
Probably the absolute worst was the 486SLC. It only had a 16bit data bus
too. They double screwed the people that bought these.:-)

--
Abit KT7-Raid (KT133) Tbred B core CPU @2400MHz (24x100FSB)
http://mysite.verizon.net/res0exft/cpu.html