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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 ...
In the simplest scheme, an address, or a numeric index, is assigned to each unit of memory in the system, where the unit is typically either a byte or a word – depending on whether the architecture is byte-addressable or word-addressable – effectively transforming all of memory into a very large array.
In theory, modern byte-addressable 64-bit computers can address 2 64 bytes (16 exbibytes), but in practice the amount of memory is limited by the CPU, the memory controller, or the printed circuit board design (e.g., number of physical memory connectors or amount of soldered-on memory).
On most modern computers, this is an eight bit string. Because the definition of a byte is related to the number of bits composing a character, some older computers have used a different bit length for their byte. [2] In many computer architectures, the byte is the smallest addressable unit, the atom of addressability, say. For example, even ...
Gulliver's Travels by Jonathan Swift, the novel from which the term was coined. In computing, endianness is the order in which bytes within a word of digital data are transmitted over a data communication medium or addressed (by rising addresses) in computer memory, counting only byte significance compared to earliness.
Alternatively many word-oriented machines implement byte operations with instructions using special byte pointers in registers or memory. For example, the PDP-10 byte pointer contained the size of the byte in bits (allowing different-sized bytes to be accessed), the bit position of the byte within the word, and the word address of the data ...
The address and value parameters may contain expressions, as long as the evaluated expressions correspond to valid memory addresses or values, respectively.A valid address in this context is an address within the computer's address space, while a valid value is (typically) an unsigned value between zero and the maximum unsigned number that the minimum addressable unit (memory cell) may hold.
The DEC PDP-10, also 36-bit, had special instructions which allowed memory to be treated as a sequence of fixed-size bit fields or bytes of any size from 1 bit to 36 bits. A one-word sequence descriptor in memory, called a "byte pointer", held the current word address within the sequence, a bit position within a word, and the size of each byte.