Re:A story about restoring and upgrading a Commodore Amiga 1000
by guenthert on Thursday January 30, 2025 @06:09AM
(#42876734)
Well, I don't think there was any consensus. Atari played on this with the "ST" (for sixteen/thirty-two) product label. From the software side it was 32bit. The flat, huge (at that time) address space made things so much easier (compared to the awful segmentation of the Intel CPUs then). That the ALU was just 16bits meant that some operations took longer than one would have liked, but was otherwise of no concern. No "far pointers" or any such crutches.
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Re:A story about restoring and upgrading a Commodore Amiga 1000
by kstrauser on Thursday January 30, 2025 @12:22PM
(#42879887)
That's how I see it. As a developer, you still used 32-bit math operations in assembly and the CPU executed them as a series of 16-bit ops. The details are abstracted away. IMO, that made it 32 bits.
By analogy, SATA is a serial protocol, but you wouldn't ordinarily refer to it as a 1-bit bus.