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According to some sources, the PowerPC 7xx family has a 64-bit data bus, but a 32-bit address bus.

I wonder what's the difference between those two, in especially: If we talk about 32-bit or 64-bit architectures, does that refer to the bitness of the data bus or the address bus? Would the 7xx family be considered a 32-bit or a 64-bit architecture?

SampleTime
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  • Possible duplicate of [Difference between memory bus and address bus](https://stackoverflow.com/q/8134545/11683) and [Is it the address bus size or the data bus size that determines “8-bit , 16-bit ,32-bit ,64-bit ” systems?](https://superuser.com/q/446395/52365) – GSerg Nov 28 '19 at 20:42
  • @GSerg The first answer in the first linked question says that the data bus determines the architecture. So with a 64-bit data bus, it should be a 64-bit architecture. However, on [Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PowerPC_7xx) it is stated that 7xx is a 32-bit architecture, which is basically the opposite. So which one is right? – SampleTime Nov 28 '19 at 21:01

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The size of registers give you the bits of architecture. Think about 8088 which is 16-bit processor but have 8-bit data bus. In PowerPC 750 processor for example you have 32 32-bit general purpose registers. So this processor is 32-bit.

Romeo Ninov
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