TechStuff Tidbits: A Bit about Bits

about connections that allow data to pass through them. That could be raw data or it could be instructions for a processor to perform on some raw data. And I mentioned that I would follow up with an episode explaining things like eight bit and sixteen bit machines all the way up to sixty four bit systems and processors. So let's get to it. And first of all, a bit. Y'all probably know this. I'm pretty sure about that. But a bit is a single unit of digital information and

it can have one of two values or states. It can either be zero or it can be a one. And I always think of a simple light switch, like a light switch. A very simple light switch can either be off or it can be on. But that's it. Those are the only two options. So when we say something is an eight bit machine, you'll likely into it that this has some relationship with eight bits, like eight units of this basic digital information, and you would be right.

When we talk about a device or a program in terms of bit numbers like this, we're talking about the capability of the machine in question. So the more bits, the more capable the machine is at handling larger units of data at once, essentially in a single cycle, which we'll get to. So let's talk about those eight bits for a second. First, with eight bits, you have two hundred and fifty six variations possible. So remember a single bit has two potential states, a zero or a one,

So that's it. It's it's two to the power of one because you have one bit with two potential states. With eight bits, you have two potential states, but eight different bits to it, so it's two to the power of eight values. That's two hundred and fifty six variations, and that goes from zero zero zero, zero, zero zero zero zero to one one one one one one one one, and then everything in between. So an eight bit system has a processor, memory, buses, et cetera that can handle

values of up to eight bits of data. So an eight bit CPU can transfer eight bits of data per clock cycle. Now I did mention we were going to circle back on what a clock cycle is. So a CPU's clock is a bit of the CPU that has an oscillating element, and that oscillation a single oscillation, is a full oscillation is a clock cycle, and that's how many cycles you have in a second. That tells you

your clock speed. So if you have an eight bit system that was running at one megahertz, then that would mean you would have a system that's running at a million cycles per second. Mega hurtz would mean that you have a million oscillations per second, and that would mean that for every second that passes, this processor could transfer eight million bits of data in eight bit chunks, and that would be the limitation of this particular system. Let's say then we were to step up to a sixteen

bit system. Now we're talking about a processor that can handle up to sixteen bits of data at any given moment. And while eight bits can represent up to two hundred and fifty six variations or values or states, if you prefer sixteen bits ups the game to sixty five thousand, five hundred and thirty six values or to the sixteenth power. So this is a big jump, right. A sixteen bit system can allow for much larger values than an eight bit system. It can handle more data in a given

amount of cycles. Now, this doesn't necessarily mean that a sixteen bit system has a faster clock speed, although it probably would. And this is where thinking about physical buses, like the kind you would get on to go to work or to school or whatever, it actually becomes a little bit useful because we can kind of use an analogy. It's an analogy that has limitations, but we can kind of think of it. So let's say we've got two buses. One bus can hold just eight people, including the driver.

The other bus can hold sixteen people including the driver. Now both buses travel the same route, and both buses have the same top speed. So Bus A, which holds eight people, gets to its destination in two hours. Let's say Bus B can hold sixteen people, but will also take two hours to get to its destination. So, in other words, both buses required the same amount of time to travel from start to finish, but Bus B was

able to carry twice as many people. Well, if we think of computer systems and computer buses, in a similar way. That kind of starts to illustrate what these different systems are capable of. However, we do have to say we're not talking about twice as many people when we go from eight bit to sixteen bit. The analogy doesn't totally work because the number of people and the bit size

of information isn't really analogous. It just lets us separate the thought of capacity from speed, because these are related but different. So as we step up from eight bit to sixteen bit, we see that the system is able to transfer way more information within a single clock cycle, and you might think that as capacity because the clock cycles are really the speed and the bit is the capacity. Here.

So if somehow you had an eight bit system that could run the gigahertz and you had a sixteen bit system that ran at a megahertz, well, yes, the sixteen bit is handling more information per clock cycle, but the eight bit system has way way way more clock cycles than the sixteen bit system does. So again, related but not the same. So a sixteen bit system could handle binary numbers up to sixteen bits long. So therefore it stands to reason that when we start getting to a

thirty two bit processor, you're talking about. It's handling values that are up to thirty two bits long, and a sixty four bit processor then handles values up to sixty four bits long or digits versus that are up to sixty four bits long. And when we get up to that capacity, the numbers start looking real meaningless because they get so big so fast. So remember sixteen bits, we're talking about, you know, sixty five, five hundred and thirty

six values. As I recall, if we're talking about thirty two bits, that jumps way up to Oh, I don't know, what is it, like four billion, two hundred ninety four million, nine hundred and sixty seven two hundred and ninety six variations. I believe, so two to the thirty second power. Yeah, that's a lot, Like suddenly we've gone super huge. But just wait, because once we get to the sixty four

bit system, forget about it. That's two to the sixty fourth power, and the number of values that you can have or represent with sixty four bits worth of information, I can't even really give you the number there, we're talking about like eighteen quintillion variations. You really need to go with scientific notation at that point in order to

really handle stuff. So you're talking about like one point eight four times ten to the nineteenth power on that one, and obviously that's an approximation, not specific, but yeah, at the end of the day, the bit designation tells us the size of data that a processor can transfer per clock cycle, how much information it can handle as it's performing these operations. So again that combined with the clock cycle speed, tells you how much information this processor can

handle at once and how fast it appears to us. Now, making this more complicated is the software side of things. It probably seems obvious that a sixteen bit machine cannot run sixty four bit code. I'm not going to get into virtual machines here, but those do complicate things even more, and without an emulator, a sixty four bit machine can't necessarily run thirty two bitcode. That being said, Windows machines

have an emulator called Wow sixty four. This allows a sixty four bit Windows device to run thirty two bit Windows based programs on it. So most Windows users won't have really many issues if they happen to have a sixty four bit machine and Windows operating system still want to run thirty two bits software. But yes, that's a

quick rundown on what those mean. So when you hear about like the original Nintendo being an eight bit system and then later systems being sixteen or thirty two bit systems, it really tells you about the capacity for those machines to handle larger amounts of information, which we typically experience either as faster processing or more sophisticated programs running on the machine. But I wanted to get down to the nitty gritty of what's happening in the bottom level to

really understand that. Okay, that's it for this super short Tedbits episode. I hope you enjoyed it, and I'll have another new episode for you tomorrow, a slightly longer one, and until then, I'll talk to you again really soon. Tech Stuff is an iHeartRadio production. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app Apple Podcasts, wherever you listen to your favorite shows.