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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 ...
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 ...
Very often, when referring to the word size of a modern computer, one is also describing the size of address space on that computer. For instance, a computer said to be "32-bit" also usually allows 32-bit memory addresses; a byte-addressable 32-bit computer can address 2 32 = 4,294,967,296 bytes of memory, or 4 gibibytes (GiB). This allows one ...
In computing, a word is any processor design's natural unit of data. 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 or computer architecture.
Hence, a microprocessor with 12-bit memory addresses can directly access 4096 words (4 kW) of word-addressable memory. IBM System/360 instruction formats use a 12-bit displacement field which, added to the contents of a base register, can address 4096 bytes of memory in a region that begins at the address in the base register.
A processor with 128-bit byte addressing could directly address up to 2 128 (over 3.40 × 10 38) bytes, which would greatly exceed the total data captured, created, or replicated on Earth as of 2018, which has been estimated to be around 33 zettabytes (over 2 74 bytes). [1] A 128-bit register can store 2 128 (over 3.40 × 10 38) different values.
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. The alternate wording b-bit aligned designates a b/8 byte aligned address (ex. 64-bit aligned is 8 bytes aligned).
The smallest unit of addressable and writable memory is the 8-bit byte. Bytes can also be held in the lower half of registers R0 through R5. 16-bit words are stored little-endian with least significant bytes at the lower address. Words are always aligned to even memory addresses. Words can be held in registers R0 through R7.