•  megopie   ( @megopie@beehaw.org ) 
    9•1 month ago

    At this point systems that need it are probably a couple decades old at least.

    But I’m sure there are people out there who are using some ancient system/program because it does what they need and don’t want to buy a new license or pay for a subscription. Guess they’ll just have to stick with the older versions and keep their systems offline to avoid security issues. Or just emulate an older system when they need it.

    •  Dave.   ( @dgriffith@aussie.zone ) 
      7•1 month ago

      Lots of expensive industrial equipment runs these kinds of processors still. You can still buy motherboards with 8 bit ISA slots even, although you’ll pay quite a premium.

      But all of that kind of gear typically runs its own distro with an in-house build system. For example, my work uses a flavour of Buildroot for their embedded Linux systems and you can just set whatever processor type you like all the way back to plain old i386 when you build it.

      •  deadcatbounce   ( @deadcatbounce@reddthat.com ) 
        1•1 month ago

        Thank-you a lot for that. I wander around the tech blogs like lobsters etc, Reddit and here but never see anything that i remember seeing (if you follow me), but I don’t consciously look.

        Encryption lengths are getting long so you’d think it was high time.

        Your description sounds like the advent of 32 bits where there was a 16 bit address bus stage.

        •  spit_evil_olive_tips   ( @spit_evil_olive_tips@beehaw.org ) 
          2•1 month ago

          Encryption lengths are getting long so you’d think it was high time.

          that’s unrelated - AES-256 for example can be executed just fine on either a 32- or 64-bit machine. in theory there’s nothing stopping you from running it on an 8-bit or 16-bit CPU (although other considerations related to the size of AES’s lookup tables make this unlikely). from some random googling, here is an implementation of Chacha20, another 256-bit encryption algorithm, for 8-bit microcontrollers.

          when we talk about 32 vs 64-bit CPUs, in general we’re only talking about the address space - the size of a pointer determines how much RAM the computer is able to use. 32-bit machines were typically limited to 4GB (though PAE helped kick that can down the road)

          CPU registers can also be sized independently of the address space - for example AVX-512 CPUs have a register that is 512 bits wide even though the CPU is still “64-bit”.

          •  deadcatbounce   ( @deadcatbounce@reddthat.com ) 
            1•1 month ago

            that’s unrelated - AES-256 for example can be executed just fine on either a 32- or 64-bit machine. in theory there’s nothing stopping you from running it on an 8-bit or 16-bit CPU (although other considerations related to the size of AES’s lookup tables make this unlikely). from some random googling, here is an implementation of Chacha20, another 256-bit encryption algorithm, for 8-bit microcontrollers.

            I started out programming a 6502a in 1980, 680X0 a little later in 87, so I get that bit, but it’s easier doing operations on a larger register. I remember writing code for 8 bit multiplication of 32 bit floating points.

            I enjoyed and understood the rest of your prose though. Didn’t do much/any programming/low level after say 2005, and regret it now. Trying to re-learn but things have moved on so much.

            I take that there isn’t much motivation in moving to 128 because it’s big enough; it’s only 8 cycles (?) to fill a 512 (that can’t be right?).