Talk:4-bit computing

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Computing High‑importance

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There should be a mention of the game & watch

The game & watch used a 4 bit processor & 43 million units were sold

Which game and which watch? :) Jdbtwo (talk) 15:05, 5 May 2019 (UTC)[reply]

So what was 4-bit about the Central Air Data Computer?

From a quick look at the architecture paper for it, it had 20-bit floating-point numbers and 20-bit instructions. It may have come out before the TMS 1000, and thus be considered "the first microprocessor", but that's not particularly relevant to a page discussing 4-bit processors in particular. (It also was a multi-chip microprocessor, so the TMS 1000 remains the first single-chip microprocessor, as the article says.) I'll remove the information about it from here unless somebody can come up with a good reason to include it. Guy Harris (talk) 22:53, 20 July 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Article title

Hello! How about renaming the article to "Four-bit architecture" or something similar? According to the Manual of Style, numbers smaller than ten should be spelled out, while "4-bit" is actually a compound adjective and as such doesn't fit well as an article title. Thoughts? — Dsimic (talk | contribs) 07:27, 26 June 2015 (UTC)[reply]

That'd make it different from all the other "N-bit" articles, for almost all of which N >= 10, so that MOS:SPELL09 doesn't apply to the others. Yes, "N-bit" might be a compound adjective, but it's the conventional way that something N bits wide is described. Guy Harris (talk) 10:22, 26 June 2015 (UTC)[reply]

On second thought, you're right, "4-bit" is simply a term on its own so it should be better to leave everything as-is. — Dsimic (talk | contribs) 11:52, 26 June 2015 (UTC)[reply]

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Dubious

The article claims that higher level programming languages, such as C, would not be compatible with a computer system whose word size is 4-bits, but this is false. Barring creating an extension to the compiler to support 4-bit data types ( eg. unsigned integers ), even if the compiler could only emit program data in 8-bit chunks, bitwise operations in the programming language could be used to get around this problem so that the packed 4-bit data values are correct. Jdbtwo (talk) 16:23, 6 January 2019 (UTC)[reply]