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Individual bytes can be accessed on a word-oriented machine in one of two ways. Bytes can be manipulated by a combination of shift and mask operations in registers. Moving a single byte from one arbitrary location to another may require the equivalent of the following: LOAD the word containing the source byte
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.
Gulliver's Travels by Jonathan Swift, the novel from which the term was coined. In computing, endianness is the order in which bytes within a word of digital data are transmitted over a data communication medium or addressed (by rising addresses) in computer memory, counting only byte significance compared to earliness.
The byte, 8 bits, 2 nibbles, is possibly the most commonly known and used base unit to describe data size. The word is a size that varies by and has a special importance for a particular hardware context. On modern hardware, a word is typically 2, 4 or 8 bytes, but the size varies dramatically on older hardware.
Frequently, half, full, double and quadruple words consist of a number of bytes which is a low power of two. A string of four bits is usually a nibble . In information theory , one bit is the information entropy of a random binary variable that is 0 or 1 with equal probability, [ 3 ] or the information that is gained when the value of such a ...
Because the Alpha uses byte addressing, this offset is still represented in the least significant bits of the address (rather than separately as a wide address), and the Alpha conveniently provides load and store unaligned instructions (ldq_u and stq_u) which ignore those bits and simply load and store the containing aligned word. [2] The later ...
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 ...
0.6–1.3 bits – approximate information per letter of English text. [3] 2 0: bit: 10 0: bit 1 bit – 0 or 1, false or true, Low or High (a.k.a. unibit) 1.442695 bits (log 2 e) – approximate size of a nat (a unit of information based on natural logarithms) 1.5849625 bits (log 2 3) – approximate size of a trit (a base-3 digit) 2 1