[aklug] Re: half a nibble?

From: Christopher Brown <cbrown@woods.net>
Date: Wed Dec 05 2012 - 03:26:28 AKST

Not a specific size, think chunk size.

Go back far enough and you will find things like 5 bit words, and memory
specs in words or kilowords.

bytes came later, as it happened on 8bit word systems and fixated on 8
bits/1byte. 16 bits = 2 bytes = 1 16bit word.

Don't follow low level CPU/memory arch much any more, but still clearly
remember discussions as of late 90s about DEC alpha memory systems
discussing things in terms of 64bit words and multi-word aligned v.s.
unaligned memory read/write.

On 12/5/12 2:45 AM, Jason McEachen wrote:
> Two bytes is a word, but I can't remember why it's called that.
> Think it had to do with addressing on sixteen bit architectures? I
> remember having to do arch checks in asm to decide if I needed to
> copy/move/walk words or longs for performance.
>
> --Jason
>
> Christopher Howard <christopher.howard@frigidcode.com> wrote:
>
>> 8 bits = a byte 4 bits = a nibble 2 bits = ...?
>>
>> Does the hardware / software industry have some official name for
>> two bytes, or a pair of boolean values? I need to pick a type name
>> in a little logic programming project I am working on and am hoping
>> to use the official name if there is one.
>>
>> -- frigidcode.com
>>
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>
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Received on Wed Dec 5 03:26:40 2012

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