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Brief Notes on Computer Word and Byte Sizes
- moremetadata 4y agoI often wonder how much better computers would be if they were designed from scratch with todays knowledge and manufacturing ability. Would they be that much better? >Words are still 32 bits, because the nomenclature is established. A pair of 64-bit registers together is said to hold a “quadword”. That is, what a “word” is is was defined by the original history of the architecture; after that, it’s likely historical. https://cse.unl.edu/~goddard/Courses/CSCE351/IntelArchitecture/IntelDataType.pdf https://cse.unl.edu/~goddard/Courses/CSCE351/IntelArchitectu... A byte is eight bits, a word is 2 bytes (16 bits), a doubleword is 4 bytes (32 bits), and a quadword is 8 bytes (64 bits) I think I'll stick to the Intel definitions.