On 20/03/07, Mike Frysinger <vapier.adi@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
On 3/20/07, Rick Brown <rick.brown.3@xxxxxxxxx> wrote: > Secondly, when we talk of 32/64 bit processor, we are talking about > the data bus width, right? The same holds when we talk about Operating > systems, right? So the size of address bus does not matter? it usually refers to the native size of the cpu ... 64bit processors work normally on registers that are 64bits in size while 32bit processors work normally on registers that are 32bits in size -mike
I agree that that's usually what people understand by 32/64 bit processors, but the whole thing is loosing meaning. AMD64/EM64T processors also have 128bit registers for the MMX/SSE stuff, and what about the x87 stuff, that uses 80bit registers, and when talking about how much memory the processor can address the Opteron has 40-bit physical and 48-bit virtual addressing and if I remember correct EM64T processors support only 36bit addresses. So it's all a little blurry... -- Jesper Juhl <jesper.juhl@xxxxxxxxx> Don't top-post http://www.catb.org/~esr/jargon/html/T/top-post.html Plain text mails only, please http://www.expita.com/nomime.html - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-newbie" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html Please read the FAQ at http://www.linux-learn.org/faqs
