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36 bits – size of word on Univac 1100-series computers and Digital Equipment Corporation's PDP-10 56 bits (7 bytes) – cipher strength of the DES encryption standard 2 6: 64 bits (8 bytes) – size of an integer capable of holding 18,446,744,073,709,551,616 different values – size of an IEEE 754 double-precision floating point number
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.
The term nibble originates from its representing "half a byte", with byte a homophone of the English word bite. [4] In 2014, David B. Benson, a professor emeritus at Washington State University, remembered that he playfully used (and may have possibly coined) the term nibble as "half a byte" and unit of storage required to hold a binary-coded decimal (BCD) digit around 1958, when talking to a ...
Various implementations of C and C++ reserve 8, 9, 16, 32, or 36 bits for the storage of a byte. [67] [68] [f] In addition, the C and C++ standards require that there be no gaps between two bytes. This means every bit in memory is part of a byte. [69] Java's primitive data type byte is defined as eight bits. It is a signed data type, holding ...
In the System/360 architecture, System/370 architecture and System/390 architecture, there are 8-bit bytes, 16-bit halfwords, 32-bit words and 64-bit doublewords. The z/Architecture , which is the 64-bit member of that architecture family, continues to refer to 16-bit halfword s, 32-bit word s, and 64-bit doubleword s, and additionally features ...
A group of eight bits is called one byte, but historically the size of the byte is not strictly defined. [2] 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.
Because the byte size of eight bits is so common, but the definition is not standardized, the term octet is sometimes used to explicitly describe an eight bit sequence. A nibble (sometimes nybble), is a number composed of four bits. [4] Being a half-byte, the nibble was named as a play on words. A person may need several nibbles for one bite ...
This table illustrates an example of an 8 bit signed decimal value using the two's complement method. The MSb most significant bit has a negative weight in signed integers, in this case -2 7 = -128. The other bits have positive weights. The lsb (least significant bit) has weight 1. The signed value is in this case -128+2 = -126.