Difference between revisions of "Word"
Chris Tyler (talk | contribs) |
Chris Tyler (talk | contribs) |
||
| Line 1: | Line 1: | ||
| − | [[Category:Computer Architecture]] | + | [[Category:Computer Architecture]] |
== Hardware Word == | == Hardware Word == | ||
Revision as of 16:23, 6 January 2014
Hardware Word
A word is the group of bits normally managed by a processor. The word size is a distinguishing feature of a processor, and is typically a power-of-two multiple of eight bits (8, 16, 32, or 64 bits), although some rare or early processors used different word sizes.
The word size is usually associated with the size of general-purpose registers and the amount of data read from or written to memory at one time.
