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In computing, a virtual address space (VAS) or address space is the set of ranges of virtual addresses that an operating system makes available to a process. [1] The range of virtual addresses usually starts at a low address and can extend to the highest address allowed by the computer's instruction set architecture and supported by the operating system's pointer size implementation, which can ...
The term bit length is technical shorthand for this measure. For example, computer processors are often designed to process data grouped into words of a given length of bits (8 bit, 16 bit, 32 bit, 64 bit, etc.). The bit length of each word defines, for one thing, how many memory locations can be independently addressed by the processor.
In logical block addressing, only one number is used to address data, and each linear base address describes a single block. The LBA scheme replaces earlier schemes which exposed the physical details of the storage device to the software of the operating system. Chief among these was the cylinder-head-sector (CHS) scheme, where blocks were addressed by means
In real mode or V86 mode, the size of a segment can range from 1 byte up to 65,536 bytes (using 16-bit offsets). The 16-bit segment selector in the segment register is interpreted as the most significant 16 bits of a linear 20-bit address, called a segment address, of which the remaining four least significant bits are all zeros.
The term 64-bit also describes a generation of computers in which 64-bit processors are the norm. 64 bits is a word size that defines certain classes of computer architecture, buses, memory, and CPUs and, by extension, the software that runs on them. 64-bit CPUs have been used in supercomputers since the 1970s (Cray-1, 1975) and in reduced ...
The alternate wording b-bit aligned designates a b/8 byte aligned address (ex. 64-bit aligned is 8 bytes aligned). A memory access is said to be aligned when the data being accessed is n bytes long and the datum address is n-byte aligned. When a memory access is not aligned, it is said to be misaligned. Note that by definition byte memory ...
In the early days of computing, it was used for differing numbers of bits based on convention and computer hardware design, but today means 8 bits. A more accurate, but less commonly used name for 8 bits is octet. Commonly, a decimal SI metric prefix (such as kilo-) is used with bit and byte to express larger sizes (kilobit, kilobyte). But ...
In contrast, a 36-bit word-addressable machine with an 18-bit address bus addresses only 2 18 (262,144) 36-bit locations (9,437,184 bits), equivalent to 1,179,648 8-bit bytes, or 1152 KiB, or 1.125 MiB — slightly more than the 8086. Some older computers (decimal computers), were decimal digit-addressable.