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Oct 13, 2011 · A less common term is word, which is a given computer architecture’s native unit of data. A word is made up of one or more bytes. For example, a computer that has 64-bit registers and 64- bit memory addressing typically has 64-bit (8-byte) words. A computer executes many operations in its native word size rather than a byte at a time.
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 ...
A byte is typically composed of 8 bits, making it the smallest addressable unit of memory in most computer systems. This means that a byte can represent 256 different values, ranging from 0 to 255. On the other hand, a word is usually made up of multiple bytes, with the size varying depending on the architecture of the system.
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. In general, the longer the architected word length, the more the ...
- Paul Kirvan
- 3 min
Mar 18, 2024 · In Scala, as is the case for Java, the byte is also an 8-bit signed two’s complement of an integer; though in contrast to Java, it isn’t a primitive data type but rather a full-blown object. For C and C++, the byte is an unsigned char. 4. Words. A word, instead, is a unit for data processing that’s specific to given computer architecture.
The bits number of a processor represents the size of a word. The number of bits in a word (the word size, word width, or word length) is an important characteristic of any specific computer architecture. It determines how big the memory can be (ie how big the memory offset number can be). See memory size The size of a word is CPU-specific32-bi64-CPU the architectureHow to determine whether a ...
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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 ...
