Path: utzoo!mnetor!uunet!lll-winken!lll-crg.llnl.gov!brooks
From: brooks@lll-crg.llnl.gov (Eugene D. Brooks III)
Newsgroups: comp.arch
Subject: Re: 16 & 32 bit vs 32 bit only instructions for RISC.
Message-ID: <4339@lll-winken.llnl.gov>
Date: 29 Feb 88 00:23:57 GMT
References: <9651@steinmetz.steinmetz.UUCP> <9678@steinmetz.steinmetz.UUCP> <2574@im4u.UUCP> <2116@saturn.ucsc.edu>
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Reply-To: brooks@lll-crg.llnl.gov.UUCP (Eugene D. Brooks III)
Organization: Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory
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In article <2116@saturn.ucsc.edu> haynes@ucscc.UCSC.EDU (Jim Haynes) writes:
>instruction sizes.  I was rather surprised to see that Sun included
>16-bit data in SPARC in this day and age of cheap memory.  8-bit data
>has the obvious utility for character strings; but do we really need
>16-bit integers anymore?
Yes, because no matter how cheap them bits are using twice as many as you
need will always cost twice as much!