But that’s building off ‘8’ as the starting unit. I can definitely imagine a counterfactual where 12bit bytes became the basic building block. Imagine if early text encoding had assumed that more than the Latin alphabet would be useful (say if standards had been being set by Japanese companies rather than American ones?) - an early maybe 10bit text standard would have weighed towards 12bit bytes being more useful. 12bit bytes also work great for encoding RGB values for video - and RGBA for image processing.
The importance of having a power-of-two bits might just not be that big a deal held up against all those upsides. After all, when do you really care about how many bits it takes to store an index into a byte, or a word, anyway? The << and >> bitshift operators even on a 64bit number are only using 6 bits of their operand, so even on an 8-bit-centric architecture you’re not realizing any great synergy with the powers of two.
Is it so hard to imagine instead a 12-bit era, followed by a 24-bit revolution, and maybe now we’d be talking about the end of 48-bit systems as the 96-bit processors start coming to market?
The importance of having a power-of-two bits might just not be that big a deal held up against all those upsides. After all, when do you really care about how many bits it takes to store an index into a byte, or a word, anyway? The << and >> bitshift operators even on a 64bit number are only using 6 bits of their operand, so even on an 8-bit-centric architecture you’re not realizing any great synergy with the powers of two.
Is it so hard to imagine instead a 12-bit era, followed by a 24-bit revolution, and maybe now we’d be talking about the end of 48-bit systems as the 96-bit processors start coming to market?