Actual 8-bit *nix.

Posted Mar 31, 2012 5:32 UTC (Sat) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523)
In reply to: Actual 8-bit *nix. by xtifr
Parent article: Grinberg: Linux on an 8-bit micro?

Technically 8088 was an 8-bit CPU :)

Okay, okay, I'm getting off your lawn.

Actual 8-bit *nix.

Posted Mar 31, 2012 9:16 UTC (Sat) by juliank (guest, #45896) [Link]

The 8088 is variation of the 16-bit 8086. Both had 16 bit registers, but the 8088 had an 8 bit data bus and was otherwise more restricted than the 8086.

The parent post talked about the 8086, though, anyway.

Actual 8-bit *nix.

Posted Mar 31, 2012 15:00 UTC (Sat) by jzbiciak (guest, #5246) [Link]

If you consider the 8086 to be a 16-bit CPU, then the 8088 was nominally a 16 bit CPU with an 8 bit bus, given that the same code would run unmodified on both, and register to register operations cost the same on both.

Well, ok, they differed slightly in rare cases where you were doing something tricky to expose the different prefetch depths on the BIU. As I recall, that was pretty much the only way to tell the two apart in software across clock rates and system architectures.