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For the linguistics term "question word", see Interrogative word. In computing, a word is the natural unit of data used by a particular processor design. A word is a fixed-sized datum handled as a unit by the instruction set or the hardware of the processor. The number of bits or digits [ a ] in a word (the word size, word width, or word length ...
Designing for high performance requires considering the restrictions of the memory hierarchy, i.e. the size and capabilities of each component. Each of the various components can be viewed as part of a hierarchy of memories ( m 1 , m 2 , ..., m n ) in which each member m i is typically smaller and faster than the next highest member m i +1 of ...
Memory address. 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 used at various levels by software and hardware. [1] Memory addresses are fixed-length sequences of digits conventionally displayed and ...
Bitmap. In computing, a bitmap (also called raster) graphic is an image formed from rows of different colored pixels. [1] A GIF is an example of a graphics image file that uses a bitmap. [2] As a noun, the term "bitmap" is very often used to refer to a particular bitmapping application: the pix-map, which refers to a map of pixels, where each ...
In computer architecture, word addressing means that addresses of memory on a computer uniquely identify words of memory. It is usually used in contrast with byte addressing, where addresses uniquely identify bytes. Almost all modern computer architectures use byte addressing, and word addressing is largely only of historical interest.
The process of putting data into blocks is called blocking, while deblocking is the process of extracting data from blocks. Blocked data is normally stored in a data buffer, and read or written a whole block at a time. Blocking reduces the overhead and speeds up the handling of the data stream. [ 3 ] For some devices, such as magnetic tape and ...
The byte is a unit of digital information that most commonly consists of eight bits. Historically, the byte was the number of bits used to encode a single character of text in a computer [1][2] and for this reason it is the smallest addressable unit of memory in many computer architectures. To disambiguate arbitrarily sized bytes from the ...
The basic unit of digital storage is a bit, storing a single 0 or 1. Many common instruction set architectures can address more than 8 bits of data at a time. For example, 32-bit x86 processors have 32-bit general-purpose registers and can handle 32-bit (4-byte) data in single instructions. However, data in memory may be of various lengths.