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        riddles >> cs >> addressing system
        
(Message started by: kirru on Jan 27^th, 2010, 10:53pm)

Title: addressing system
Post by kirru on Jan 27^th, 2010, 10:53pm

what are the all important differences between byte addressable and word addressable systems??

Title: Re: addressing system
Post by Grimbal on Jan 28^th, 2010, 9:40am

I'd like to say it doesn't matter. Any difference is taken care of by the compiler.

- With word-addressable systems you can address more data with the same pointer size.

- With word-addressable systems, you tend to have problems implementing "pointer to char". On these machines a char could be redefined to have the size of a word. Or, sometimes, special instructions are added to emulate pointer to char by recomputing the address, reading a word and shifting around the bytes to get one char.

- I think that except for supercomputers, all computers are byte-addressable.