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Re: Identifying CPU and current OS



On 2025-09-29, Michael Stone <mstone@debian.org> wrote:
> On Mon, Sep 29, 2025 at 05:26:54AM -0500, Richard Owlett wrote:
>>Underlying my question was the assumption that when a processor was 
>>referred to as 32 or 64 bit, it was a reference to the width of the 
>>data bus.
>
> Not really, which is why this was a weird/misleading/confusing question. 
> A "bus" is the physical connection between components in a computer. The 
> (basically obsolete) phrase "data bus" referred to the physical 
> connection between the processor and external components. In early 

I thought a 32-bit data bus meant → 4 bytes at once, and 64-bit data bus
meant → 8 bytes at once (i.e. the number of bits capable of being
transferred over the bus in parallel, simultaneously).

I also believed there were actually two types of widths: the data bus
width, and the CPU architecture width, and that the two didn't
necessarily have to match.

But now we're far astray, n'est-ce pas?


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