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From: BGB <cr88192@gmail.com>
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Subject: Re: Byte Addressability And Beyond
Date: Fri, 3 May 2024 22:11:44 -0500
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On 5/3/2024 9:00 PM, John Levine wrote:
> According to Lawrence D'Oliveiro  <ldo@nz.invalid>:
>>> Others have provided good answers for that.  Here's another one: Given
>>> the requirements (based on the predecessors), there was not reason to go
>>> beyond byte addressing.  And looking at history, this seems to have been
>>> the right choice.
>>
>> That applied back in history, when we had fewer addressing bits to play
>> with, what about now?
> 
> What applications do you think would work better with bit addressing?
> 
> I can think of some kinds of data compression that use variable sized
> bit fields, and I suppose graphics rendering although these days it's
> rare to find a display without at least 8 bits per pixel and in any
> event, most displays have GPUs nearby to do the rendering.
> 

Yeah, maybe data-compression, but then to be useful here, one would 
likely end up needing 4R and 5R instructions. Not likely worth it.

Not a huge use-case in graphics, as noted, in most cases this is done 
with 16 or 32 bit pixels; and bit-plane graphics are long since dead.


> Compare that to all the other stuff for which bit addressing would just
> be extra baggage.  Where's the benefit?
> 

Basically agreed.