Differences between 8bit, 16bit, 32bit, and 64bit Video Lecture - Computer Science Engineering (CSE)

hi everybody my name is Nicholas powers
with arrow electronics and today we're
talking about some tech trivia and I'm
not going to go super deep into the
technology behind this but I wanted to
cover what the heck doesn't mean when
something says it is 8-bit 16-bit 32-bit
or 64-bit or even hundred and twenty
8-bit in the future when we're talking
specifically about microcontrollers and
micro processors well that can refer to
the data bus with the addressing width
so kind of how many different unique
memory addresses can it understand or
the register
width and the register width is really
how much data can you manipulate at once
with an 8-bit microprocessor that is
treated as 2 to the 8th so that is 255
unique numbers so 0 through 255 because
it's 2 to the 8th minus 1 or if you move
to 16-bit that is actually 65,000
approximate and if you move up to 32 but
you're in the 4.3 million range
so as you want to work on larger and
larger numbers you actually need greater
register widths so you can actually deal
with them low register lengths when
you're dealing with the 8-bit 16-bit
32-bit 64-bit in the memory addressing
space it's actually something we ran
into recently with computer memory all
of our personal computers generally were
based around the 32-bit microprocessor
that meant it could address 2 to the
32nd unique memory spaces this limit us
to an effective about 4 gigabytes of RAM
realistically it was around three
point-two five gigabytes of RAM now
moving into the 64-bit realm it actually
allows us terabytes of RAM so huge
amounts of vast storage that we can use
for working with programs now some of
the history about the 8-bit 16-bit
32-bit microprocessor is actually the
first 8-bit microprocessor that I really
know of is the Intel 8 0 0 8 it was
produced in 1972 it was the first
general-purpose 8-bit microprocessor
microcontroller and then what's really
interesting is it didn't take very long
for the world to get to 16-bit 32-bit
and 64-bit in fact the Cray 1
supercomputer was using 64-bit register
length so come
feel a huge amounts of data and that was
in the 70s and 80s but it actually only
had a 32-bit memory addressing space so
it was still limited to the gigabytes of
RAM which in that day and age was an
enormous amount of memory now you might
be wondering yourself okay so this
affects the amount of data that a
processor can manipulate it affects the
amount of memory that it can address but
at the end of the day what does it
really matter well since everything the
majority of part you're working on
nowadays are 32-bit or 64-bit where it
actually comes in differences are the
unique instruction sets implemented on
each processor so typically you have
your add your multiply subtract divide
functions but then you get into unique
situations where you have a risk or a
sisk processor this is reduced
instruction set or complex instruction
set processors a reduced instruction set
processor breaks up the actions that
manipulate memory so translating from a
register to the memory versus the
register to register actions so these
commands won't all do one or they won't
do everything in just one go they will
first manipulate the registers and then
put that back in the memory or then pull
it out of memory whereas complex
instruction set micro processors those
would be like your x86 ones so what you
would expect from Intel or AMD those
ones can do memory manipulation and
memory storage or retrieval in the same
instruction so it's just a different way
to think about it and right now the
majority of our phones are embedded
devices all those are on reduced
instructions that micro processors and
microcontrollers one of the reduced
instruction set styles of computing
would be the arm microprocessor arm is a
company out of the UK that helps to
design microchips and micros
microarchitectures and helps to specify
exactly which instructions will be
present within the code that people can
rely on for doing data manipulation it
is a reduced instruction set style of
implementation so one set does memory
and other does manipulation they don't
all do one at once but arm micro
architecture is probably the most common
one you're familiar with it's present in
our phones as present in all of our
embedded devices and it is a set of No
instructions and architectures that
everybody well that all arm licensees
can implement in their own chips so what
I've got here is I've actually got a
free scale kinetise M 0 plus this is
actually an arm M 0 plus micro
architecture that free scale has
implemented on their chip so it follows
the instruction set for the arm M 0 plus
so when you've got M 0 pluses generally
all M 0 pluses have a subset of a subset
of instructions that they will all have
in common they all have similar
behaviors and pretty similar performance
but different implementations result in
better power savings or other things I
also have the tried-and-true Arduino Uno
it has an atmel 18 mega 328p on it
that's an 8-bit reduced instruction set
microprocessor and then when we get into
the world of much more powerful things
this is the brand-new Raspberry Pi 3 I
guess is not brand new anymore but it's
still pretty new this has a Broadcom
chipset on it is actually 64-bit ARM
based microarchitecture so it can handle
much higher amounts of memory and much
larger numbers that it can crunch thanks
for joining me for this dive into the
kind of fundamentals the basics on what
the difference is between 8-bit 16-bit
32-bit 64-bit microcontrollers and at
the end of the day the takeaway is the
higher the number the more data you can
manipulate and the more instructions you
can use so thanks for joining me and if
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