Whateva

EDIT: So what defines the byte size for a system? The register size? If so, then what’s a word?

who cares about bytes and words, it’s all about nibbles and more importantly: meganibbles.

GrahamS – you’re really not doing your image any good….

I have an image??? 😕

And it’s one that can get worse???? 😯

Oh dear.

So what defines the byte size for a system?

I’m not entirely sure. I think it is basically the smallest unit that you can work with at the hardware/assembly level.

i.e. a modern 64-bit PC has a 64-bit word, but the x86 instruction set it uses contains instructions that operate on 8-bit bytes (e.g. LODSB, STOSB, CMPSB).

Any women reading this thread are just so hot right now… 🙂

Word.

Up.

What’s a “women”?

I always though a word was twice as many bits as a byte. Hence in Windows typedefs WORD = 16 bits.

Nope, that’s just a hangover from 16-bit versions of Windows.

I hate windows typedefs.

I hate window pelmets

small b is a bit, large B is a byte.

Not sure why they picked 4 bits to a byte, I think it was to do with the size of the MC instruction sets

The 8 bit byte was introduced by IBM with the 360 architecture.

FWIW.

who cares about bytes and words, it’s all about nibbles and more importantly: meganibbles.

Nibbles are good, MegaNibbles even better… I’m not so hot on the middle ground though, the KilaNibble has always filled me with dread personally!

If so, then what’s a word?

A Word is as long or as short as its needed to be. It can be 8 bits, or 16 bits, or it could be 1 bit, 39 bits, 427 bits, or however long it needs to be to represent a large enough number as is required. AFAIK, the 8, 16, 32 and 64 bits that we have become familiar with is purely because those are the convenient sizes that were determined by Microsoft/Apple/Intel/AMD etc for their computers and operating systems. You can of course represent any number with a word larger than is required, it will just begin with a lot of zeroes… For instance, if you wanted to represent the number 4 with a 64 bit word, it is just going to start with 61 zeroes which is kind of redundant…