Search results
Results from the WOW.Com Content Network
For example, Microsoft's Windows API maintains the programming language definition of WORD as 16 bits, despite the fact that the API may be used on a 32- or 64-bit x86 processor, where the standard word size would be 32 or 64 bits, respectively. Data structures containing such different sized words refer to them as: WORD (16 bits/2 bytes)
1 byte 8 bits Byte, octet, minimum size of char in C99( see limits.h CHAR_BIT) −128 to +127 0 to 255 2 bytes 16 bits x86 word, minimum size of short and int in C −32,768 to +32,767 0 to 65,535 4 bytes 32 bits x86 double word, minimum size of long in C, actual size of int for most modern C compilers, [8] pointer for IA-32-compatible processors
The byte, 8 bits, 2 nibbles, is possibly the most commonly known and used base unit to describe data size. The word is a size that varies by and has a special importance for a particular hardware context. On modern hardware, a word is typically 2, 4 or 8 bytes, but the size varies dramatically on older hardware.
Frequently, half, full, double and quadruple words consist of a number of bytes which is a low power of two. A string of four bits is usually a nibble . In information theory , one bit is the information entropy of a random binary variable that is 0 or 1 with equal probability, [ 3 ] or the information that is gained when the value of such a ...
The byte is a unit of digital information that most commonly consists of eight bits. 1 byte (B) = 8 bits (bit).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.
A 64-bit float is sometimes called a "real64" or a "double", meaning "double-precision floating-point value". The relation between numbers and bit patterns is chosen for convenience in computer manipulation; eight bytes stored in computer memory may represent a 64-bit real, two 32-bit reals, or four signed or unsigned integers, or some other ...
For example, the Cray X1 uses 64-bit words, but addresses are only 32 bits; when an address is stored in memory, it is stored in its own word, and so the byte offset can be placed in the upper 32 bits of the word. The inefficiency of using wide addresses on that system is just all the extra logic to manipulate this offset and extract and insert ...
0.6–1.3 bits – approximate information per letter of English text. [3] 2 0: bit: 10 0: bit 1 bit – 0 or 1, false or true, Low or High (a.k.a. unibit) 1.442695 bits (log 2 e) – approximate size of a nat (a unit of information based on natural logarithms) 1.5849625 bits (log 2 3) – approximate size of a trit (a base-3 digit) 2 1