Byte Byte The byte is a unit of digital information that most commonly consists of eight bits, representing a binary number. Historically, the byte was the number of bits used to encode a single character of text in a computer and for this reason it is the smallest addressable unit of memory in many computer architectures. The size of the byte has historically been hardware dependent and no definitive standards existed that mandated the size – byte-sizes from 1 to 48 bits are known to have been used in the past. Early character encoding systems often used six bits, and machines
64-bit computing in 64 bits depends on the integer representation used. With the two most common representations, the range is 0 through 18,446,744,073,709,551,615 (2 − 1) for representation as an (unsigned) binary number, and −9,223,372,036,854,775,808 (−2) through 9,223,372,036,854,775,807 (2 − 1) for representation as two's complement. Hence, a processor with 64-bit memory addresses can directly access 2 bytes (=16 exabytes) of byte-addressable memory. With no further qualification, a "64-bit computer architecture" generally has integer and addressing processor registers that are 64 bits wide, allowing direct support for 64-bit data types and addresses. However, a CPU might have external data buses or address