The beauty of 32 bits: This near-optimum bit width has unprecedented potential for the well-informed designer of microprocessor-based systems

In discussing the development of the 32-bit ship, the author points out that designers have borrowed extensively from the concepts and technologies behind mainframes as very large scale integration advances have steadily increased the capabilities of microprocessor chip sets. In the latest generations of 32-bitters, this influence is seen in pipelining, memory management, floating-point arithmetic, and processing rates. Each of these is discussed. The problems that these new chips pose for system designers are then described, and it is pointed out that some of the new features of the chips can make machines less deterministic. Attention is also given to the problem of building systems around microprocessors with execution times so short that conventional dynamic RAM is barely able to keep up with them.