How many bits is a “word”?

I’m not familiar with either of these books, but the second is closer to current reality. The first may be discussing a specific processor.

Processors have been made with quite a variety of word sizes, not always a multiple of 8.

The 8086 and 8087 processors used 16 bit words, and it’s likely this is the machine the first author was writing about.

More recent processors commonly use 32 or 64 bit words.

In the 50’s and 60’s there were machines with words sizes that seem quite strange to us now, such as 4, 9 and 36. Since about the 70’s word size has commonly been a power of 2 and a multiple of 8.

Related Posts:

  1. Why is 1 Byte equal to 8 Bits? 
  2. TypeError: a bytes-like object is required, not ‘str’ when writing to a file in Python3
  3. What does value & 0xff do in Java?
  4. max value of integer
  5. Converting string to byte array in C#
  6. How to create an array of bits in Python?
  7. Convert bytes to int?
  8. Does sizeof return the number of bytes or the number of octets of a type in C?
  9. What is the difference between a string and a byte string?
  10. How do I initialize a byte array in Java?
  11. Implement division with bit-wise operator
  12. How to declare and use 1D and 2D byte arrays in Verilog?
  13. How to Convert Int to Unsigned Byte and Back
  14. MySQL Error #1071 – Specified key was too long; max key length is 767 bytes
  15. Swapping 2 Bytes of Integer
  16. The difference between logical shift right, arithmetic shift right, and rotate right

Leave a Comment