Hacker News Reader

Comment by wewtyflakes | Hacker News Reader

If the CPU is nibble-oriented, wouldn't that mean that that is its byte size?

Are you trying to make a pun with byte/bite relating to nibble? Because that's actually where the term nibble (referring to 4 bits) comes from, so I'm not sure such a pun even counts as a pun anymore. Or am I misinterpreting your comment?

I was not making a pun, though the terms of art in that area were clearly made to be puns. I was pointing out that the byte-size of a CPU is typically defined as its smallest addressable unit, so, I was confused to see a CPU using an architecture that works with half of that size; it does not make sense to me.

When did we stop spelling it "nybble"?

"Nibble" may well have always been in use by folks, and nybble may have actually come later. At the very least, references to each spelling being in use exist for the last ~60 years.

The first book match I get for "nibble" near "byte" is in the 1964 "System 360 Assembler Language" by Don H. Stabley uses nibble. The earliest match I can find for "nybble" in relation to computers was the 1968 "Encyclopedia of library and information science". Nybble (and likely nibble) itself doesn't seem to have taken off until around the mid 1970s https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=nybble&year_st...

References to the coining of the term in 1958 of course don't provide a textual source.

I was wondering this as well. Probably when a new wave of people discovered the concept in the absence of the older wave? By contrast, "byte" has been in use continuously and widely.

A byte is always 8 bits. The word you're looking for is `word-size` which, in this case would be 4 bits.

A byte is not always 8 bits on old machines, though it is standardised as 8 bits nowadays.

This is why network RFCs talk of "octets", to avoid the ambiguity. Octets are always 8 bits.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Octet_(computing)

The definition of a byte today is different than the definition of byte when those machines were manufactured. Just like how 'foot' is now standardized(*)

(* technically, a 'foot' is not a standard unit of measure but that's due to the long history of 'foot' not being standardized until relatively recently)

No. 8 bit bytes are the de facto standard but that is in no way official nor the definition of the word. You can find modern niche projects with non-8-bit bytes (and by extension non-32 or 64 bit words).

I didn't realize that there was a 16 bit name called a 'chomp' haha. But more formally hextet.

That is false. A byte is the base grouping and a word is the native size for a given operation. Some architectures even expose multiple word sizes. (TBF the entire concept can be quite fuzzy depending on the implementation.)

I think you might be missing the attempt at humor.

It's actually "nybble."

Reply on news.ycombinator.com