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In a computer using virtual memory, accessing the location corresponding to a memory address may involve many levels. In computing, a memory address is a reference to a specific memory location in memory used by both software and hardware. [1] These addresses are fixed-length sequences of digits, typically displayed and handled as unsigned ...
Another example in the same computer family was the 16-bit protected mode of the 80286 processor, which, though supporting only 16 MB of physical memory, could access up to 1 GB of virtual memory, but the combination of 16-bit address and segment registers made accessing more than 64 KB in one data structure cumbersome.
A memory address a is said to be n-byte aligned when a is a multiple of n (where n is a power of 2). In this context, a byte is the smallest unit of memory access, i.e. each memory address specifies a different byte. An n-byte aligned address would have a minimum of log 2 (n) least-significant zeros when expressed in binary.
(In the examples that follow, a, b, and c are (direct or calculated) addresses referring to memory cells, while reg1 and so on refer to machine registers.) C = A+B 0-operand (zero-address machines), so called stack machines: All arithmetic operations take place using the top one or two positions on the stack: [9] push a, push b, add, pop c.
Note how the use of A[i][j] with multi-step indexing as in C, as opposed to a neutral notation like A(i,j) as in Fortran, almost inevitably implies row-major order for syntactic reasons, so to speak, because it can be rewritten as (A[i])[j], and the A[i] row part can even be assigned to an intermediate variable that is then indexed in a separate expression.
A processor with 128-bit byte addressing could directly address up to 2 128 (over 3.40 × 10 38) bytes, which would greatly exceed the total data captured, created, or replicated on Earth as of 2018, which has been estimated to be around 33 zettabytes (over 2 74 bytes). [1] A 128-bit register can store 2 128 (over 3.40 × 10 38) different values.
Note that this is more or less the same as base-plus-offset addressing mode, except that the offset in this case is large enough to address any memory location. Example 1: Within a subroutine, a programmer may define a string as a local constant or a static variable. The address of the string is stored in the literal address in the instruction.
Each segment was placed at a specific location in memory by the software being executed and all instructions that operated on the data within those segments were performed relative to the start of that segment. This allowed a 16-bit address register, which would normally be able to access 64 KB of memory space, to access 1 MB of memory space.