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

Rarely has an advancement in microelectronics been so long awaited and so loudly trumpeted as the introduction of the 32-bit microprocessor. Not long after the first 4- and 8-bit microprocessors were introduced in the early 1970s and 16-bit chips were on the horizon, designers realized that the progression would eventually lead to microprocessors that accessed and manipulated addresses and data 32 bits at a time. General-purpose minicomputers and mainframes had more or less already settled on that bit width as a good compromise between speed, which favors long bit widths for faster access to large blocks of data, and efficiency, which limits the width to avoid wasting bits.