What were the historical forces at work, the tradeoffs to make, in deciding to use groups of eight bits as the fundamental unit? There were machines, once upon a time, using other word sizes. But t...

Apr 30, 2017 · 2 Current and common processing units are 8, 16, 32, 64, 128, etc bit. Why are their datapath multiple of 8 ? Is this all linked to the fact that the industry has settled with a 8-bit byte ? …

Dec 9, 2021 · A byte is at least large enough to contain any member of the basic execution character set and the eight-bit code units of the Unicode UTF-8 encoding form and is composed of a contiguous …

Jul 23, 2012 · If you use an eight bit sized character, how will you support multiple languages, like Russian and Greek within the same application? What about Chinese or Japanese?

Aug 30, 2021 · In this representation, 65535 is represented by 16 bits: 1111111111111111. This requires two eight-bit bytes. If the requirement is to have a representation that only handles the two …

Apr 24, 2021 · Imagine that you have an 8-bit computer with 8-bit addresses, wired to a single RAM chip. Inside the chip, a multiplexer decodes the 8-bit address to one of 256 values, effectively turning …

There is a bit field in the opcode to specify the location of the single bit or the number of bits to shift. If the word width is a power of two, this bit field requires log 2 (word_width) bits to cover the whole word.

You need log2 (n) bits to address n bytes. For example, you can store 256 different values in an 8 bit number, so 8 bits can address 256 bytes. 2 10 = 1024, so you need 10 bits to address every byte in …

Jan 29, 2013 · This isn't strictly speaking true. Some languages (like C/C++) provide ways of storing boolean values as single bits, if these bits are bundled in a single byte. In other words, in C, you can …

Oct 23, 2023 · Now with native 64 bit registers there is the problem that with int = 64 bit you cannot have 8, 16 and 32 bit types in C, because you only have two type names char and short.