Physics is another reason. Since things are so small these days, you don't want a large amount of 1s or 0s because the charge will "leak" into neighboring cells

Physics is another reason. Since things are so small these days, you don't want a large amount of 1s or 0s because the charge will "leak" into neighboring cells. In the case of buses, anything other than a nominal 50/50 distribution requires too much power or will confuse the automatic gain control on the RX end of the link. DDR3&4 is a good example of this where the CPU scrambles[0] what is written to physical memory to get the data closer to 50/50 1s and 0s. In this case I doubt this is the primary reason though. [0]: https://web.eecs.umich.edu/~taustin/papers/HPCA17-coldboot.pdf https://web.eecs.umich.edu/~taustin/papers/HPCA17-coldboot.p...