Word & Byte Addressable Memory | COA

In this video, we will be talking about memory, and more specifically about word & byte addressable memory.

In our systems, we have a processor and an attached memory to store both data and instructions. The memory is divided into equal parts known as “cells”, and each cell is uniquely identified by a binary number called, “address”. For a “4096 x 16” memory. 4096 represents the number of cell in the memory chip, i.e. (4096 or 212), it indicates that each memory address will be of 12 bits atleast and 16 represents the size of each cell, here each cell can store 16 bits, i.e. 2 bytes.

Memory can be addressed in two ways: Byte addressable memory and word addressable memory.

When the cell size in the memory is equal to one byte or 8-bit then it is known as byte addressable memory. When the cell size = word length of the CPU then it is referred as Word addressable memory. The default memory configuration of a computer system is Byte addressable.

Related Articles :  https://www.geeksforgeeks.org/difference-between-byte-addressable-memory-and-word-addressable-memory/