everyone keeps asking me why x86 uses an 8-bit byte, but I'm struggling to find an explanation that makes sense to me. Can any of you help?
what I've found so far
- it looks like x86 evolved from the intel 8008 (from 1972), which was an 8-bit CPU
- the 8008 came after the 4004, which was 4-bit
some questions I have:
- was the reason to build an 8-bit CPU to increase the size of the instruction set? or something else?
- did x86 really directly evolve from the intel 8008?
would love any links!
@b0rk well back in the days we had a distinction between bytes (8 bits), nibbles (4 bits) and words, which were different based on how many bits the cpu processed in a single instruction (8 bits had 8 bit words, 16 bits 16, and so on).
Never occurred to me there were non 8-bit bytes.
@palin I think we still have the distinction between bytes and words, but nobody really talks about nibbles anymore
(I actually don't understand why people ever talked about nibbles in the first place -- I'd be curious to understand that too)
@b0rk @palin They're used sometimes on old embedded hardware, or at least they were back when embedded hardware had more restrictions on space/memory. For color palettes and the like.
It's related to how some programmers will still try to pack 8 booleans into a single byte despite the fact that 8 bytes is nothing to a modern computer.
