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The byte is a unit of digital information that most commonly consists of eight bits. 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. To disambiguate arbitrarily sized bytes from the ...
These prefixes are more often used for multiples of bytes, as in kilobyte (1 kB = 8000 bit), megabyte (1 MB = 8 000 000 bit), and gigabyte (1 GB = 8 000 000 000 bit). However, for technical reasons, the capacities of computer memories and some storage units are often multiples of some large power of two, such as 2 28 = 268 435 456 bytes.
Computers usually manipulate bits in groups of a fixed size, conventionally named "words". Like the byte, the number of bits in a word also varies with the hardware design, and is typically between 8 and 80 bits, or even more in some specialized computers. In the 21st century, retail personal or server computers have a word size of 32 or 64 bits.
Orders of magnitude (data) An order of magnitude is usually a factor of ten. Thus, four orders of magnitude is a factor of 10,000 or 10 4. This article presents a list of multiples, sorted by orders of magnitude, for units of information measured in bits and bytes. The byte is a common unit of measurement of information (kilobyte, kibibyte ...
1 o = 8 bits. The octet is a unit of digital information in computing and telecommunications that consists of eight bits. The term is often used when the term byte might be ambiguous, as the byte has historically been used for storage units of a variety of sizes. The term octad (e) for eight bits is no longer common. [1][2]
As char 's size is always the minimum supported data type, no other data types (except bit-fields) can be smaller. The minimum size for char is 8 bits, the minimum size for short and int is 16 bits, for long it is 32 bits and long long must contain at least 64 bits.
In computing, a word is the natural unit of data used by a particular processor design. A word is a fixed-sized datum handled as a unit by the instruction set or the hardware of the processor. The number of bits or digits [ a ] in a word (the word size, word width, or word length) is an important characteristic of any specific processor design ...
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 ...