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What exactly is a word ?

Sat, 07 May 2011 01:02:00 -0700

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

Re: What exactly is a word ?

Tue, 17 May 2011 14:03:50 -0700

Well, a simple search can enable easily find this out.

The very first result from that is this.

Re: What exactly is a word ?

Wed, 25 May 2011 06:18:17 -0700

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.

Re: What exactly is a word ?

Mon, 29 Oct 2012 22:43:32 -0700

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.

Re: What exactly is a word ?

Mon, 29 Oct 2012 22:45:22 -0700