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Mar 7, 2009 · In Windows x64 for example an application can be run either as a 64 bit application (having a 64 bit mahine word), or as a 32 bit application (having a 32 bit machine word). So the size of a machine word can differ even on the same machine. The term WORD has different meaning depending on how it's used. It can either mean a machine word, or a ...
Word (computer architecture) 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 ...
- Bytes
- Bytes, Processors, and Programming
- Words
- Words and Operations
- Conclusion
The smallest unit of digital information is the binary bit. Modern processors don’t however perform direct operations on them, not even bitwise logic. Instead, they operate on collections of bits that take the name of bytes, and that are the smallest units of information that they can address in the memory. The byte today consists of 8 bits, but th...
A byte is also the smallest unit of information that can have an address in the memory of a computer. While digital information uses bits as its fundamental unit, processors don’t directly operate on bits. Instead, they retrieve from the memory a byte containing the bit on which they need to operate. Then, they compute the required operation and st...
A word, instead, is a unit for data processing that’s specific to given computer architecture. We saw how the size of a byte originates from the encoding of characters; the size of a word, instead, depends on the instruction set of a processor. The word is, usually, the sequence of bits that can be transferred from the working memory to the registe...
Words can also have different structures, in the sense that they comprise bits with different meanings. Typical operations on words, such as logical manipulation, floating-point arithmetic, or address arithmetic, each use individual word structures. As an example, this is a structure for a 64-bit word for floating-point arithmetics: Where indicates...
In this tutorial, we analyzed the characteristics of words and bytes and discussed their different relationships with memory and processors.
You often hear about 32-bit or 64-bit computer architectures. A word is basically the number of bits a particular computer's CPU can deal with in one go. It varies depending on the computer architecture you're using. Imagine looking at an imaginary computer's circuitry very closely. On a 32-bit machine, you would see 32 wires running parallel ...
Word = a sequence of N bits where N = 16, 32, 64 depending on the computer. There are 2 N words of length N. Why? How many bytes are there? Measuring Amount of Data/Memory Capacity. 1 kilobyte = 1 KB = 2 10 bytes = 1024 bytes (appx 10 3 bytes) 1 Megabyte = 1 MB = 2 20 bytes = 1,048,576 bytes (appx 10 6 bytes) 1 Gigabyte = 1 GB = 2 30 bytes ...
Oct 13, 2011 · A word is a fixed sized group of bits that are handled as a unit by the instruction set and/or hardware of the processor. That means the size of a general purpose register ( which is generally more than a byte ) is a word. In the C, a word is most often called an integer => int. answered Oct 13, 2011 at 6:23.
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For any computer architecture with an 8-bit byte, the word size is some multiple of 8 bits. In IBM's System/360 mainframe architecture, a word is 32 bits, or four contiguous 8-bit bytes. In Intel's PC processor architecture, a word is 16 bits, or two contiguous 8-bit bytes.
