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if 8 bits is a byte, 16 bits is a word, 32 bits is a long Then what — Parallax Forums

if 8 bits is a byte, 16 bits is a word, 32 bits is a long Then what

mickalmickal Posts: 75
edited 2014-04-23 12:06 in General Discussion
What is 64 bits? as in Windows & 64 bit. I just upgraded my OS. But I stuck with win 7, 32 bit on account I wanted to have the least amount of drama with my legacy drivers and apps. Pleased to say everything works fine and within a few days I liked using Win 7 more than XP by a long shot and it even feels like it is running faster now . I have never had a lot of programs installed.

Its a garden gnome average variety Dell Latitude D630 Dual Core 2.2Ghz (2007 manufactured) with Intel Graphics and 2 Gig ram but Im also running a 3d Game editor well and Blender an open source 3D Modelling package, though its at its limit with all this or close to.(or not if you dont mind a little slower rendering)

I just saw this same model go for $170 au on ebay. Believe me that was a steal. Dell is good!

Slight divergence there but time to time people here have asked about some of these things.

As far as my question, I think on a 64 bit system you'd call it a 64 bit byte. Using that reasoning the prop has a 32 bit byte., even when dealing with an 8 bit byte on this mc you end up doing operations to allow for the other 24 bits.

I mentioned once I had major problems with hands and legs because of spinal accident. well over last few weeks with constant hospital therapy I have had a pretty decent jump in walking and hand dexterity & feeling. They said that could happen but I was a real doubter, So Im taking in a few bottles of the family vinyard wine, Pig Pen Red to the physio's today. I will warn them we call it it Chicken Wine , as after drinking it you just feel like having a lay down. Also we think its a great wine to pour for visitors , hee hee :)
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Comments

  • PJAllenPJAllen Banned Posts: 5,065
    edited 2011-04-10 13:01
    1/2 a byte is a nibble
    2 bytes is a chomp

    ... and a byte is always 8 bits.

    PE - "Word" is fluid. In Stamp-Land it's 16 bits. But a "long", 32-bits in Propeller-Land, could be figured as a "Word" in other contexts.
  • Phil Pilgrim (PhiPi)Phil Pilgrim (PhiPi) Posts: 23,514
    edited 2011-04-10 13:15
    Where I grew up, two bits was a quarter, eight bits was a buck, making 64 bits equal to eight bucks, or 0.8 sawbucks. So I guess a buck and a byte are the same thing. :)

    Seriously, though, here's a reference that might be useful:

    And, mickal, 'glad to hear you're on the mend!

    -Phil
  • Martin_HMartin_H Posts: 4,051
    edited 2011-04-10 13:29
    Honestly the names for data types is a bit of a train wreck. While bit, nibble, and byte are standard, int, word and long are platform and language specific. For example on a 32 bit system in C it's usually called a long long, but on a 64 bit system its called long. So the same program compiled on two different machines could yield different results.

    To avoid this most of the C programs I've worked on start by creating a header which defines Int8, Int16, Int32, and Int64 in platform independent manner.

    For some real fun. What are the order of the bytes within a long?
  • kwinnkwinn Posts: 8,697
    edited 2011-04-10 13:36
    Martin_H wrote: »
    Honestly the names for data types is a bit of a train wreck.......

    For some real fun. What are the order of the bytes within a long?

    Martin_H That's it...go ahead, poke a stick in that hornets nest ;-)
  • Beau SchwabeBeau Schwabe Posts: 6,566
    edited 2011-04-10 15:46
    64-Bits is an OctaByte
    128-Bits is a HexaByte

    :smile:
  • Phil Pilgrim (PhiPi)Phil Pilgrim (PhiPi) Posts: 23,514
    edited 2011-04-10 15:52
    Beau, wouldn't 128 bits be a hexadecibyte? -Phil
  • kwinnkwinn Posts: 8,697
    edited 2011-04-10 16:57
    64-Bits is an OctaByte
    128-Bits is a HexaByte

    :smile:

    A few years back I saw a lot of references to 32 bits being a QuadByte, but not so much lately. Are these now the "official" designations?

    PS - Phil, you are a real sh?% disturber. Keep up the good work ;-)
  • kwinnkwinn Posts: 8,697
    edited 2011-04-10 17:09
    Actually Phil has a point. Hexa means six, and decimal ten. Hexadecimal refers to the 16 (6+10) states 4 bits represent. Logically that would make a HexaByte 48 bits. My preference is Byte, Word, Double (or DWord), and QuadWord for 8, 16, 32, and 64 bits respectively. That would make 128 bits an OctaWord. Much more consistent!
  • FranklinFranklin Posts: 4,747
    edited 2011-04-10 20:01
    1 bit = bug byte
  • Beau SchwabeBeau Schwabe Posts: 6,566
    edited 2011-04-10 20:27
    Yeah, that Phil is a real smartie pants, but I think we'll put up with him and keep him - lol :-)

    Phil, actually your right about that 'hecatoicosioctaBIT' needing to be properly called a 'hexadeciBYTE'
  • P!-RoP!-Ro Posts: 1,189
    edited 2011-04-10 20:45
    Franklin wrote: »
    1 bit = bug byte
    Lol, so what's a nibble?
  • Phil Pilgrim (PhiPi)Phil Pilgrim (PhiPi) Posts: 23,514
    edited 2011-04-10 20:47
    Parsing; hecato(100)icosi(20)octa(8)BIT. Hecato- ? Now that's one I had to look up! So who's the "smartie pants" now? I vote for Mr. Schwab! :)

    -Phil
  • PJAllenPJAllen Banned Posts: 5,065
    edited 2011-04-10 20:50
    P!-Ro posted, "Lol, so what's a nibble?"

    Lunch? True Love?
  • Phil Pilgrim (PhiPi)Phil Pilgrim (PhiPi) Posts: 23,514
    edited 2011-04-10 20:54
    I've always spelled it "nybble", despite PBASIC's "Nib". (It helps to alleviate confusion when PJ's definitions are also in play. :) ) Anyone else?

    -Phil
  • PJAllenPJAllen Banned Posts: 5,065
    edited 2011-04-10 21:11
    From "Modern Dictionary of Electronics", 6th Ed., Rudolf Graf:


    nibble - Also nybble. A sequence of 4 bits operated upon as a unit. Also see Byte.
    nybble - Also nibble. Half a byte (4 bits). Bcd data is packed into nybbles.


    Also, therein, 'word' is indefinite; varying between computer types, the largest group of bits handled throughout the processor.

    Had enough of this, yet, mickal?
  • Phil Pilgrim (PhiPi)Phil Pilgrim (PhiPi) Posts: 23,514
    edited 2011-04-10 21:19
    In case Mickal is not yet satiated, I will officially coin the word "phrayse" to mean n conjoined words of the system's native word length, where n is also system-dependent. This is not to be confused with "syntence", which is m conjoined phrayses. Both n and m must be powers of two ... of course.

    -Phil
  • PJAllenPJAllen Banned Posts: 5,065
    edited 2011-04-10 21:35
    myckal noted, "...as after drinking it you just feel like having a lay down."

    Oenophiles understand laying down as storing, usually for later use, young wines are for laying down -- and others are "...for laying down and avoiding." [I looked all over YouTube for that Monty Python sketch and all they had was some bloke's imitation.]
  • mickalmickal Posts: 75
    edited 2011-04-10 23:26
    I thought I was short a bottle of chicken wine when I was handing it out. Obviously I mistakenly left a bottle in this forum. You guys seem to like it .. I hope you fellas are not driving home :) But thanks all for clearing that up for me. ...........did I just say that??????? um... it all makes perfect sense somehow... I think I better put my own cork back in :thumb:
  • localrogerlocalroger Posts: 3,451
    edited 2011-04-11 05:33
    When I took the comp sci intro course at the local university in 1980, the professor insisted that a byte was "any subdivision of a computer word." And while it was true that the documentation for the DEC PDP-10 used the word that way it was very obvious (this being the heyday of Byte magazine) that nobody else used it that way, and I decided it would probably be a bad idea to major in computer science there.
  • kwinnkwinn Posts: 8,697
    edited 2011-04-11 19:12
    localroger wrote: »
    When I took the comp sci intro course at the local university in 1980, the professor insisted that a byte was "any subdivision of a computer word." And while it was true that the documentation for the DEC PDP-10 used the word that way it was very obvious (this being the heyday of Byte magazine) that nobody else used it that way, and I decided it would probably be a bad idea to major in computer science there.

    Some early computers had byte (and/or character) sizes that were odd by today's standards. I have seen systems with 12, 14, and 18 bit words and address bus width, and they used 6, 7, and 6 bit characters, which were also referred to as bytes. One of the more unusual systems had a 12 bit word, 6 bit byte, 8 registers, and only 32 instructions.
  • LoopyBytelooseLoopyByteloose Posts: 12,537
    edited 2011-04-12 06:12
    Linguistically, you are all right, alright?

    Actually what you are discussing is inherent in languages that as names evolve and extend themselves, there is a tendency to descend into a chaos of multiple schemes; e.g. the American billion and British billion are not the same.

    Why is this so? Language generally develops within 'speech communities' that have a need to communicate. But as other communities exploit imported knowledge, necessities arise that cause an overlay of new systems on the old.

    The byte was easily universalized because it supported the ASCII alphabetical system (and EBDIC as well), but now we have 64bit and 128 bit with not much to tie it to in terms of a related language code.

    In sum, language systems tend towards a chaos of fragmented systems and plain old idiomatic usage - very untidy from an engineering point of view. But we are social animals that want to share info with our friend and exclude it from our enemies - so the situation is unlikely to every change.
  • ctwardellctwardell Posts: 1,716
    edited 2011-04-12 07:30
    Hmmm, this talk of nibbles and nybbles has me trying to recall a computer from the late 70's that I seem to recall being named "the nibbler", possibly by National Semiconductor or National Instruments. I recall seeing it in the Digi-Key catalogs back them.

    Ring a bell for anyone?

    Might provide some fodder for another prop based emulator...

    C.W.
  • Martin_HMartin_H Posts: 4,051
    edited 2011-04-12 13:44
    localroger and kwinn, the Digital Equipment Corporation PDP-10/Tops-10 machines had a 36 bit word length and didn't have the concept of a byte as we're used to it. Instead it had bit field operations which were used to access any size byte you cared to define. Actually come to think of it I'm pretty sure the System 360 was only 32 bit word addressable as well. You used masks and bit shifts to get down to the byte which again was convention.
  • Lord SteveLord Steve Posts: 206
    edited 2011-04-13 16:04
    In case Mickal is not yet satiated, I will officially coin the word "phrayse" to mean n conjoined words of the system's native word length, where n is also system-dependent. This is not to be confused with "syntence", which is m conjoined phrayses. Both n and m must be powers of two ... of course.

    -Phil

    I assume when you want to look up words used in your conjoyned phrayses you use a dyctionary, thysaurus, or other sych refyrence wyrks.
  • WossnameWossname Posts: 174
    edited 2011-08-04 12:42
    In my formative years as a IA-32 assembly enthusiast, a 64-bit integral was referred to as a "quadword", but I now suspect that was just the habits of the author of the rather meteorically brilliant book I was learning from.
  • TorTor Posts: 2,010
    edited 2011-08-04 13:42
    Back when 32-bit mini- and microcomputer systems started to appear it wasn't unusual to use nibble=4bits, byte=8bits, halfword=16bits, word=32bits. More than 32 became a bit vague, but I've seen 'doubleword' used. I still like to think in nibbles, bytes, halfwords and words for those types. Makes a lot of sense.

    'long' as '32 bits' went out of fashion when 32-bit systems took over from 16-bit systems, but lots of people continued to use the C-type 'long' out of habit when they meant a 32-bit value (although at that point 'int' had become the defacto 32-bit type). That, of course, created only trouble when 'long' changed meaning to 'size of a pointer' and 64-bit systems appeared. As for the 64-bit type itself there's no common definitive name, unless you count 'int64_t' etc. 'long long' also means 64-bit integer even on 64-bit systems, just to make it more interesting. (64-bit Windows throws a spanner in the works because, unlike every 64-bit *nix, 'long' isn't 64 bits there from what I understand).

    With the Propeller it seems we're back to 'long' as 32-bit type, but personally I'm fine with that because 'long' has such a unique, special meaning here.. we're counting 'longs' and use them as indicators of size of code and data.

    -Tor
  • Roy ElthamRoy Eltham Posts: 3,000
    edited 2011-08-04 14:32
    I've always equated 32bits with double word (or dword), and 64bits with quad word (or qword). For 128bits Octaword is right but sounds weird. In code, in windows land, we have used used '__int128' or '_m128' when dealing with 128bit values which are usually used with XMM registers for SSE. There's also '__int256' now for the newest CPUs with 4 wide double float registers.
  • LoopyBytelooseLoopyByteloose Posts: 12,537
    edited 2011-08-04 23:35
    Creation of names has always seemed to lack planning. A billion here is not a billion somewhere else. Descriptions such as 'word' and 'long' are often specific to the software as much as they may be to the platform. So confusion abounds.

    Blender is a great 3-D animator program. But you might want to study Gimp for 2-D animation and creation of storyboards before you try to do too much with Blender. 3-D takes acquiring a lot of various skills and may tend to bog down in a high learning curve.

    These days I am learning how to get Gimp to produce simple .GIF animations and it is quite rewarding.
  • GadgetmanGadgetman Posts: 2,436
    edited 2011-08-05 02:03
    I can't remember the instruction-width of the DEc PDP-11/750 I used for a course in assembly programming anymore.
    What I do remember is that the operands were in the 'reverse order' and that everything had to be written in Octal.

    As for Longs, double longs and whatever...
    I once worked with ADA. Stodgy language(this was back in 1990), and what I loved was the strict rules about implementation.
    An integer was an integer, was an integer... Except...
    The specification uses a DWord(32bit), but the Janus ADA package I used at home used a 16bit representation for Integer, and had a 32bit 'Long integer'...
    (I 'fixed' it with a couple of definitions, so that I could use the files on the VAX ADA implementation)
  • LoopyBytelooseLoopyByteloose Posts: 12,537
    edited 2011-08-05 03:35
    I feel a bit foolish as I just' found out that Blender also suppports 2D animation and storyboards - so no need for Gimp.

    With 32bit per pixel and generally 4Gytes of Dram or less, it is hard to see the need for 64bit processing. I am sure there are 'Yes... but's'. But I have my hands full with 32bits in a Propeller and why do we need color or graphic resolution far beyond our ability to see?

    Yes, you can get more Dram - a lot more. But I am certainly not there yet.
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