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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. Instructions could automatically adjust the pointer to the next byte on, for example, load and deposit (store) operations.
The nibble, 4 bits, represents the value of a single hexadecimal digit. 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 ...
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.
For example, the Cray X1 uses 64-bit words, but addresses are only 32 bits; when an address is stored in memory, it is stored in its own word, and so the byte offset can be placed in the upper 32 bits of the word. The inefficiency of using wide addresses on that system is just all the extra logic to manipulate this offset and extract and insert ...
Bits are transmitted one at a time in serial transmission. By contrast, multiple bits are transmitted simultaneously in a parallel transmission. A serial computer processes information in either a bit-serial or a byte-serial fashion. From the standpoint of data communications, a byte-serial transmission is an 8-way parallel transmission with ...
Similarly, the most significant bit (MSb) represents the highest-order place of the binary integer. The LSb is sometimes referred to as the low-order bit or right-most bit, due to the convention in positional notation of writing less significant digits further to the right. The MSb is similarly referred to as the high-order bit or left-most bit.
On most modern computers, the smallest data group with an address is eight bits long and is called a byte. Larger groups comprise two or more bytes, for example, a 32-bit word contains four bytes. There are two possible ways a computer could number the individual bytes in a larger group, starting at either end.
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 – equivalent to 1 "word" on 64-bit computers (Power, PA-RISC, Alpha, Itanium, SPARC, x86-64 PCs and ...