C and C++

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What exactly is a word ? Posted by tubby on 7 May 2011 at 1:02 AM
Hello people,
What exactly is a word ?
I know a word is basically a unit and i know the word=2 bytes on an x-86 processor.
But is the word size the same on an Itanium Processor as well ?
I feel 1 word = 2bytes(x86)
= 4bytes(32 bit system)
= 8bytes(64 bit system)
That is the word size ,is always taken such that The size of a pointer is always equal to 1 word

Please clarify
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Re: What exactly is a word ? Posted by HK_MP5KPDW on 17 May 2011 at 2:03 PM
Well, a simple search can enable easily find this out.

The very first result from that is this.
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Re: What exactly is a word ? Posted by Malcolm_McLean on 25 May 2011 at 6:18 AM
Processors have an address bus and a data bus. The address bus says "give me the contents of this location in memory", the data bus says "these are the contents". In C, addresses are pointers.
Normally it's handy to have the data bus and the address bus the same width, but this needn't be the case. The 286 was an important exception.

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Re: What exactly is a word ? Posted by sapoorva on 29 Oct 2012 at 10:43 PM
Word is nothing but what a processor can process at an instance. As you told that for all x86 processor family we have

1 word = 2bytes(x86 16 bit system)
1 word = 4bytes(32 bit system)
1 word = 8bytes(64 bit system)

This variation is because 16 bits system can process 16 bits = 2 bytes at a time. Similarly for 32 bits system it is 4 bytes.

So the core thing is
1 word = number of bytes that can be processed by a processor at an instance.
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Re: What exactly is a word ? Posted by sapoorva on 29 Oct 2012 at 10:45 PM
Word is nothing but what a processor can process at an instance. As you told that for all x86 processor family we have

1 word = 2bytes(x86 16 bit system)
1 word = 4bytes(32 bit system)
1 word = 8bytes(64 bit system)

This variation is because 16 bits system can process 16 bits = 2 bytes at a time. Similarly for 32 bits system it is 4 bytes.

So the core thing is
1 word = number of bytes that can be processed by a processor at an instance.



 

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