To elaborate on “12bit bytes also work great for encoding RGB values for video”: I just mean that it’s easy to encode an RGB value as three four-bit values in

To elaborate on “12bit bytes also work great for encoding RGB values for video”: I just mean that it’s easy to encode an RGB value as three four-bit values in a 12-bit number. Aligning ‘memory addresses’ to ‘pixels’ would simplify video hardware. Historically, 4096-color modes based on 12-bits-per-pixel were used (notably on the Amiga), in spite of byte-alignment issues. And of course 24-bit pixels would map to the common 16m colors we all know and love. 8, 16 and 32 bit architectures have always had compromises of one sort or another for storing three color channels - I half feel like the ubiquity of ARGB in modern graphics is down to our finally accepting that storage and memory are now cheap enough we should stop worrying about waste, pad out pixels with another channel, and just find a use for it. Transparency? Sure, why not. Regarding how RAM is laid out… a lot of early computers used ram chips striped by bit - so they’d have eight ram chips all wired to the same address bus, with each responsible for storing one data line for each address. Twelve bit memory is just laying four more data lines and adding four more chips. In my hypothetical counterfactual universe, obviously if 12 bit bytes win, later memory architectures are built around 12/24/48/96 bit data buses, so whatever paging and slicing they do would be within that model.