On 2025-09-29, Michael Stone <[email protected]> wrote: > On Mon, Sep 29, 2025 at 05:26:54AM -0500, Richard Owlett wrote: >>Underlying my question was the assumption that when a processor was >>referred to as 32 or 64 bit, it was a reference to the width of the >>data bus. > > Not really, which is why this was a weird/misleading/confusing question. > A "bus" is the physical connection between components in a computer. The > (basically obsolete) phrase "data bus" referred to the physical > connection between the processor and external components. In early
I thought a 32-bit data bus meant → 4 bytes at once, and 64-bit data bus meant → 8 bytes at once (i.e. the number of bits capable of being transferred over the bus in parallel, simultaneously). I also believed there were actually two types of widths: the data bus width, and the CPU architecture width, and that the two didn't necessarily have to match. But now we're far astray, n'est-ce pas?
