Byte addressing Byte addressing Byte addressing refers to hardware architectures which support accessing individual bytes of data rather than only larger units called words, which would be "word-addressable". Such computers are sometimes called "byte machines" (in contrast to "word machines"). The basic unit of digital storage is called a bit, storing a single 0 or 1. Many common architectures can address more than 8 bits of data at a time. For example, the Intel 386SX processor can handle 16-bit (two-byte) data, since data is transferred over a 16-bit bus. However, data in memory may be of various lengths. A 64-bit architecture machine
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