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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.
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 ...
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.
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 ...
The Cray X1 uses byte addressing with 64-bit addresses. It does not directly support memory accesses smaller than 64 bits, and such accesses must be emulated in software. The C compiler for the X1 was the first Cray compiler to support emulating 16-bit accesses. [1] The DEC Alpha uses byte addressing with 64-bit addresses. Early Alpha ...
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.
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 in memory used by both software and hardware. [1] These addresses are fixed-length sequences of digits, typically displayed and handled as unsigned ...
When byte processing is to be a significant part of the workload, it is usually more advantageous to use the byte, rather than the word, as the unit of address resolution. Address values which differ by one designate adjacent bytes in memory. This allows an arbitrary character within a character string to be addressed straightforwardly.