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andrea76today at 6:22 AM3 repliesview on HN

From webpage I read: " Search or browse games, applications, demos, graphics, music and tools from the golden age of 32-bit home computing."

But Amiga has a 16 bit CPU... or not?


Replies

doenertoday at 7:39 AM

"From a developer's point of view, the 68000 provides a full suite of 32-bit operations but has a 16-bit external data bus and is implemented using a 16-bit arithmetic logic unit, so 32-bit computations are transparently handled as multiple 16-bit values at a performance cost. Also, while addresses are 32-bit, the chip is limited to 16 MB of physical memory using the lower 24 of the address bits.[35][36] The later Amiga 2500, Amiga 3000, Amiga 4000 and Amiga 1200 models use fully 32-bit, 68000-compatible processors from Motorola with improved performance and larger addressing capability."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amiga

maffydubtoday at 6:32 AM

It's a bit complicated and it depends on what exactly you're measuring. The 68000 CPU has 32-bit registers internally, the address bus is 24-bit, and the data bus is 16.

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catoctoday at 6:35 AM

I think most Amiga’s had 32-bit registers, but a 16-bit bus.

(So to everything around the CPU they were 16-bit even though internally they could do 32-bit computations)

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