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The reason for this is that a byte is normally the smallest unit of addressable memory (i.e. data with a unique memory address). This applies to bitwise operators as well, which means that even though they operate on only one bit at a time they cannot accept anything smaller than a byte as their input.
An eight-bit processor like the Intel 8008 addresses eight bits, but as this is the full width of the accumulator and other registers, this could be considered either byte-addressable or word-addressable. 32-bit x86 processors, which address memory in 8-bit units but have 32-bit general-purpose registers and can operate on 32-bit items with a ...
Although they give a convenient syntax, the bits are still accessed using bytewise operators on most machines, and they can only be defined statically (like C's static arrays, their sizes are fixed at compile-time). It is also a common idiom for C programmers to use words as small bit arrays and access bits of them using bit operators.
If that memory is arranged in a byte-addressable flat address space using 8-bit bytes, then there are 65,536 (2 16) valid addresses, from 0 to 65,535, each denoting an independent 8 bits of memory. If instead it is arranged in a word-addressable flat address space using 32-bit words, then there are 16,384 (2 14 ) valid addresses, from 0 to ...
When reading from memory, data addressed by MAR is fed into the MDR (memory data register) and then used by the CPU. When writing to memory, the CPU writes data from MDR to the memory location whose address is stored in MAR. MAR, which is found inside the CPU, goes either to the RAM (random-access memory) or cache.
These inputs often have a negative logic function (CS or CE), i. H. with an adjacent logical zero (voltage level low) is selected. The address decoder uses the different combinatorial logic to place the memory modules or chips in the address space of a processor. The memory modules often have a smaller capacity than the address space.
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.
Each memory location was byte-addressable. This results in a total addressable space of 2 24 × 1 byte = 16,777,216 bytes or 16 megabytes. The 286 and later could also function in real mode, which imposed the addressing limits of the 8086 processor. The 286 had support for virtual memory.