Rather than extra bits, we may end up with ternary computers for AI. That's right, ternary is back with a new name: 1.58 bits
We'd be better off with 9-bit bytes
351–359 of 359 posts
Re: We'd be better off with 9-bit bytes
#352Earlier quoted context omitted.
I've always held opinion that ideal base for our day life computation is 12. It's close enough to 10, so most things would work just as well (like you just need to remember 2 more digits), but it's actually divisible by 3, 4, 6 which is a lot more useful than 5, compared to 10-base.
> " (like you just need to remember 2 more digits) " "The standard among mathematicians for writing larger bases is to extend the Arabic numerals using the Latin alphabet, so ten is written with the letter A and eleven is written with the letter B. But actually doing it that way makes ten and eleven look like they're too separate from the rest of the digits so you can use an inverted two for ten and an inverted three…
>...one gross eight dozen ten great gross ten gross three dozen five eleven gross eleven dozen eleven great gross eleven dozen eleventh's
Now do PI!
Then Tom Lehrer's New Math.
Re: We'd be better off with 9-bit bytes
#353Earlier quoted context omitted.
I've always held opinion that ideal base for our day life computation is 12. It's close enough to 10, so most things would work just as well (like you just need to remember 2 more digits), but it's actually divisible by 3, 4, 6 which is a lot more useful than 5, compared to 10-base.
Ideally you learn with what you are both with. It’s easy to have base 10 as you have ten fingers. If we only had 8 fingers we could have ended up with octal
You must be an AI, since I only have 8 fingers and two thumbs. ;)
Re: We'd be better off with 9-bit bytes
#354Earlier quoted context omitted.
I've always held opinion that ideal base for our day life computation is 12. It's close enough to 10, so most things would work just as well (like you just need to remember 2 more digits), but it's actually divisible by 3, 4, 6 which is a lot more useful than 5, compared to 10-base.
Ideally you learn with what you are both with. It’s easy to have base 10 as you have ten fingers. If we only had 8 fingers we could have ended up with octal
Civilisations of the past used various numeric systems, including 5, 8 and 12. It's not like 10 was universal truth across all the lands.
Re: We'd be better off with 9-bit bytes
#355Earlier quoted context omitted.
> (i.e. the word pronounced my-newt) "minute" comes from latin "pars minuta" and the "i" should be pronounced like in "minimum" > By this logic, 0.016 (recurring) seconds should be a called a "third". It should be "tertia". I found that in German and Polish it was used that way, but don't know about english: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tertie_(Winkel) https://pl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tercja_k%C4%85towa
Should be the etymology of trice (but isn't). Odd omission from English. Commodores had a 1/60 second "jiffy" for timing interrupts, that's all I could find.
Unix V1 also used 1/60 seconds
Re: We'd be better off with 9-bit bytes
#356Earlier quoted context omitted.
The fixed point TI dsp chips always had a long int that was 48. Intel had 84 bit floating point registers before simd registers took over. And the pdp-11... Powers of two aren't as ubiquitous as it seems. If anything, the hardware uses whatever sizes it wants and that gets abstracted from the rest of the world by compilers and libraries.
The pdp-11 was 16-bit.
They probably meant PDP-8.
Re: We'd be better off with 9-bit bytes
#357Non-power-of-2 sizes are awkward from a hardware perspective. A lot of designs for e.g. optimized multipliers depend on the operands being divisible into halves; that doesn't work with units of 9 bits. It's also nice to be able to describe a bit position using a fixed number of bits (e.g. 0-7 in 3 bits, 0-31 in 5 bits, 0-63 in 6 bits), e.g. to represent a number of bitwise shift operations, or to select a bit from a…
Author here. It's true that you'd need one more bit to represent a bit position in a word, like for shifts, but we're already vastly over-provisioned; even in 64-bit registers we're only using six of eight bits. (Plus, in a lot of places we'd have that extra bit around!) Some hardware circuits are a bit nicer with power-of-two sizes but I don't think it's a huge difference, and hardware has to include weird stuff lik…
[deleted]
Re: We'd be better off with 9-bit bytes
#358Earlier quoted context omitted.
You are correct. The Sperry-Univac 1100 series though did have 36 bit words and 9 bit bytes.
IIRC, its instruction set supported words (36 bits), half words (18 bits), third words (12 bits), quad words (9 bits), and sixth words (6 bits). For characters, 6 bits also was used at times, for example in its disk format. There, a severely limited character set wasn’t problematic.
> quad words
Shouldn't that be quarter words? Quad means quadruple.
Re: We'd be better off with 9-bit bytes
#359Earlier quoted context omitted.
Well, the 6809 was basically the same in these respects. Internal registers are 16 bit, with the accumulator (A) being provisioned as two 8 bit registers (A, B) as needed. Index X, Y, Stack, User Stack, PC, are all 16 bit registers. The Hitachi 6309, adds to that with up to 32 bit register sizes in specific cases. In any case, the ALU and data transfers are 8 bits and I am not sure I ever saw the 6809 referenced as a…
I'd say that it's a somewhat extended 8bit device because it's still 8bit focused architecture (6800) with extensions towards better handling of 16bit values and certain common parts involved including the zero/direct page are also effectively an increase in flexibility for 8bit code not so much move to 16bit. That said, "16bit curious" is a great term :D
I'm glad you like it. I've used that term for years because I don't know what to call a chip like the 6809.
It certainly can punch well above its weight class, at least when compared with 6502 z80 and some others.
I really can't call it 16 bit, because of the small address space, and the fact that the ALU is 8-bit. But you can't always go by the ALU because I believe the z80 and 8080 have four bit ALUs. And I don't think there's anyone that would call those chips four bit.
Motorola seemed to design things in a specific way that people really liked, and this pushing the limits of what is an expert design seems to be one of those because even going back to the 6800, the one index register was 16 bit.
And lastly the 68k is an exemplary design, but in the same design language is 32 bit curious.