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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 ...
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 ...
In computer architecture, the memory hierarchy separates computer storage into a hierarchy based on response time.Since response time, complexity, and capacity are related, the levels may also be distinguished by their performance and controlling technologies. [1]
The CPU in modern computer hardware performs reads and writes to memory most efficiently when the data is naturally aligned, which generally means that the data's memory address is a multiple of the data size. For instance, in a 32-bit architecture, the data may be aligned if the data is stored in four consecutive bytes and the first byte lies ...
In computer science and computer engineering, computer architecture is a description of the structure of a computer system made from component parts. [1] It can sometimes be a high-level description that ignores details of the implementation. [2] At a more detailed level, the description may include the instruction set architecture design ...
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.
In computer science, a pointer is an object in many programming languages that stores a memory address. This can be that of another value located in computer memory, or in some cases, that of memory-mapped computer hardware. A pointer references a location in memory, and obtaining the value stored at that location is known as dereferencing the ...
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 ...