Some architectures use 8 bit bytes, but not really. What I mean is: some architectures require a word bigger than 8 bits (16+) be aligned. As in: to read a 32 b

Some architectures use 8 bit bytes, but not really. What I mean is: some architectures require a word bigger than 8 bits (16+) be aligned. As in: to read a 32 bit word from memory, the first octet must have an address ending in two zero bits. But if you want to read only a byte, alignment doesn’t matter. IIRC, ARM used to have this “alignment” requirement.