Speaker 1: Welcome to tech Stuff, a production from iHeartRadio. Hey there,
Speaker 1: and welcome to tech Stuff. I'm your host, Jonathan Strickland.
Speaker 1: I'm an executive producer with iHeartRadio and how the tech
Speaker 1: are you? So? Last week I did an episode about
Speaker 1: CPU architecture, and I talked about buses, which in this
Speaker 1: case are not vehicles meant to transport a group of
Speaker 1: folks from one place to a destination. Instead, we're talking
Speaker 1: about connections that allow data to pass through them. That
Speaker 1: could be raw data or it could be instructions for
Speaker 1: a processor to perform on some raw data. And I
Speaker 1: mentioned that I would follow up with an episode explaining
Speaker 1: things like eight bit and sixteen bit machines all the
Speaker 1: way up to sixty four bit systems and processors. So
Speaker 1: let's get to it. And first of all, a bit.
Speaker 1: Y'all probably know this. I'm pretty sure about that. But
Speaker 1: a bit is a single unit of digital information and
Speaker 1: it can have one of two values or states. It
Speaker 1: can either be zero or it can be a one.
Speaker 1: And I always think of a simple light switch, like
Speaker 1: a light switch. A very simple light switch can either
Speaker 1: be off or it can be on. But that's it.
Speaker 1: Those are the only two options. So when we say
Speaker 1: something is an eight bit machine, you'll likely into it
Speaker 1: that this has some relationship with eight bits, like eight
Speaker 1: units of this basic digital information, and you would be right.
Speaker 1: When we talk about a device or a program in
Speaker 1: terms of bit numbers like this, we're talking about the
Speaker 1: capability of the machine in question. So the more bits,
Speaker 1: the more capable the machine is at handling larger units
Speaker 1: of data at once, essentially in a single cycle, which
Speaker 1: we'll get to. So let's talk about those eight bits
Speaker 1: for a second. First, with eight bits, you have two
Speaker 1: hundred and fifty six variations possible. So remember a single
Speaker 1: bit has two potential states, a zero or a one,
Speaker 1: So that's it. It's it's two to the power of
Speaker 1: one because you have one bit with two potential states.
Speaker 1: With eight bits, you have two potential states, but eight
Speaker 1: different bits to it, so it's two to the power
Speaker 1: of eight values. That's two hundred and fifty six variations,
Speaker 1: and that goes from zero zero zero, zero, zero zero
Speaker 1: zero zero to one one one one one one one one,
Speaker 1: and then everything in between. So an eight bit system
Speaker 1: has a processor, memory, buses, et cetera that can handle
Speaker 1: values of up to eight bits of data. So an
Speaker 1: eight bit CPU can transfer eight bits of data per
Speaker 1: clock cycle. Now I did mention we were going to
Speaker 1: circle back on what a clock cycle is. So a
Speaker 1: CPU's clock is a bit of the CPU that has
Speaker 1: an oscillating element, and that oscillation a single oscillation, is
Speaker 1: a full oscillation is a clock cycle, and that's how
Speaker 1: many cycles you have in a second. That tells you
Speaker 1: your clock speed. So if you have an eight bit
Speaker 1: system that was running at one megahertz, then that would
Speaker 1: mean you would have a system that's running at a
Speaker 1: million cycles per second. Mega hurtz would mean that you
Speaker 1: have a million oscillations per second, and that would mean
Speaker 1: that for every second that passes, this processor could transfer
Speaker 1: eight million bits of data in eight bit chunks, and
Speaker 1: that would be the limitation of this particular system. Let's
Speaker 1: say then we were to step up to a sixteen
Speaker 1: bit system. Now we're talking about a processor that can
Speaker 1: handle up to sixteen bits of data at any given moment.
Speaker 1: And while eight bits can represent up to two hundred
Speaker 1: and fifty six variations or values or states, if you
Speaker 1: prefer sixteen bits ups the game to sixty five thousand,
Speaker 1: five hundred and thirty six values or to the sixteenth power.
Speaker 1: So this is a big jump, right. A sixteen bit
Speaker 1: system can allow for much larger values than an eight
Speaker 1: bit system. It can handle more data in a given
Speaker 1: amount of cycles. Now, this doesn't necessarily mean that a
Speaker 1: sixteen bit system has a faster clock speed, although it
Speaker 1: probably would. And this is where thinking about physical buses,
Speaker 1: like the kind you would get on to go to
Speaker 1: work or to school or whatever, it actually becomes a
Speaker 1: little bit useful because we can kind of use an analogy.
Speaker 1: It's an analogy that has limitations, but we can kind
Speaker 1: of think of it. So let's say we've got two buses.
Speaker 1: One bus can hold just eight people, including the driver.
Speaker 1: The other bus can hold sixteen people including the driver.
Speaker 1: Now both buses travel the same route, and both buses
Speaker 1: have the same top speed. So Bus A, which holds
Speaker 1: eight people, gets to its destination in two hours. Let's
Speaker 1: say Bus B can hold sixteen people, but will also
Speaker 1: take two hours to get to its destination. So, in
Speaker 1: other words, both buses required the same amount of time
Speaker 1: to travel from start to finish, but Bus B was
Speaker 1: able to carry twice as many people. Well, if we
Speaker 1: think of computer systems and computer buses, in a similar way.
Speaker 1: That kind of starts to illustrate what these different systems
Speaker 1: are capable of. However, we do have to say we're
Speaker 1: not talking about twice as many people when we go
Speaker 1: from eight bit to sixteen bit. The analogy doesn't totally
Speaker 1: work because the number of people and the bit size
Speaker 1: of information isn't really analogous. It just lets us separate
Speaker 1: the thought of capacity from speed, because these are related
Speaker 1: but different. So as we step up from eight bit
Speaker 1: to sixteen bit, we see that the system is able
Speaker 1: to transfer way more information within a single clock cycle,
Speaker 1: and you might think that as capacity because the clock
Speaker 1: cycles are really the speed and the bit is the capacity. Here.
Speaker 1: So if somehow you had an eight bit system that
Speaker 1: could run the gigahertz and you had a sixteen bit
Speaker 1: system that ran at a megahertz, well, yes, the sixteen
Speaker 1: bit is handling more information per clock cycle, but the
Speaker 1: eight bit system has way way way more clock cycles
Speaker 1: than the sixteen bit system does. So again, related but
Speaker 1: not the same. So a sixteen bit system could handle
Speaker 1: binary numbers up to sixteen bits long. So therefore it
Speaker 1: stands to reason that when we start getting to a
Speaker 1: thirty two bit processor, you're talking about. It's handling values
Speaker 1: that are up to thirty two bits long, and a
Speaker 1: sixty four bit processor then handles values up to sixty
Speaker 1: four bits long or digits versus that are up to
Speaker 1: sixty four bits long. And when we get up to
Speaker 1: that capacity, the numbers start looking real meaningless because they
Speaker 1: get so big so fast. So remember sixteen bits, we're
Speaker 1: talking about, you know, sixty five, five hundred and thirty
Speaker 1: six values. As I recall, if we're talking about thirty
Speaker 1: two bits, that jumps way up to Oh, I don't know,
Speaker 1: what is it, like four billion, two hundred ninety four million,
Speaker 1: nine hundred and sixty seven two hundred and ninety six variations.
Speaker 1: I believe, so two to the thirty second power. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that's a lot, Like suddenly we've gone super huge. But
Speaker 1: just wait, because once we get to the sixty four
Speaker 1: bit system, forget about it. That's two to the sixty
Speaker 1: fourth power, and the number of values that you can
Speaker 1: have or represent with sixty four bits worth of information,
Speaker 1: I can't even really give you the number there, we're
Speaker 1: talking about like eighteen quintillion variations. You really need to
Speaker 1: go with scientific notation at that point in order to
Speaker 1: really handle stuff. So you're talking about like one point
Speaker 1: eight four times ten to the nineteenth power on that one,
Speaker 1: and obviously that's an approximation, not specific, but yeah, at
Speaker 1: the end of the day, the bit designation tells us
Speaker 1: the size of data that a processor can transfer per
Speaker 1: clock cycle, how much information it can handle as it's
Speaker 1: performing these operations. So again that combined with the clock
Speaker 1: cycle speed, tells you how much information this processor can
Speaker 1: handle at once and how fast it appears to us. Now,
Speaker 1: making this more complicated is the software side of things.
Speaker 1: It probably seems obvious that a sixteen bit machine cannot
Speaker 1: run sixty four bit code. I'm not going to get
Speaker 1: into virtual machines here, but those do complicate things even more,
Speaker 1: and without an emulator, a sixty four bit machine can't
Speaker 1: necessarily run thirty two bitcode. That being said, Windows machines
Speaker 1: have an emulator called Wow sixty four. This allows a
Speaker 1: sixty four bit Windows device to run thirty two bit
Speaker 1: Windows based programs on it. So most Windows users won't
Speaker 1: have really many issues if they happen to have a
Speaker 1: sixty four bit machine and Windows operating system still want
Speaker 1: to run thirty two bits software. But yes, that's a
Speaker 1: quick rundown on what those mean. So when you hear
Speaker 1: about like the original Nintendo being an eight bit system
Speaker 1: and then later systems being sixteen or thirty two bit systems,
Speaker 1: it really tells you about the capacity for those machines
Speaker 1: to handle larger amounts of information, which we typically experience
Speaker 1: either as faster processing or more sophisticated programs running on
Speaker 1: the machine. But I wanted to get down to the
Speaker 1: nitty gritty of what's happening in the bottom level to
Speaker 1: really understand that. Okay, that's it for this super short
Speaker 1: Tedbits episode. I hope you enjoyed it, and I'll have
Speaker 1: another new episode for you tomorrow, a slightly longer one,
Speaker 1: and until then, I'll talk to you again really soon.
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