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LETıS PLAY A GAME

Sieve of Eratosthenes
by George Martin

Start ı Remember the Sieve ı Testing 2, 4ı ı Try, Try Again ı Sources and PDF

Every month, we (Circuit Cellar columnists) write our technical articles in hopes of helping you get to the bottom of certain problems. Well, for a change, Iım not going to do any problem solving this month. Iım just going to have a little fun with the PC.

Most of us have moved up to a Pentium by now. I have a 200-MHz PII from Intel and a 233-MHz from AMD. Iıve got several ı386 and ı486 machines running Win95 that I use in circuit emulators and test machines. Win95 and the latest software packages claim 32-bit capabilities, and for a long time, I just thought 32 bits was twice as big as 16 bits and never gave it more thought. But, think about it for a minute.

Sixteen-bit numbers can go from 0 to 65,536, but 32-bit numbers go from 0 to 4,294,967,296. Thatıs a big difference. These machines are capable of doing integer arithmetic on that 32-bit number in one clock cycle. And, the move to 64-bit numbers (1.844674407371e + 19) is just a double precision step away. Thatıs 18,446,744,073,709,551,616, give or take a million.

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