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Word

Revision as of 20:42, 15 December 2013 by Chris Tyler (talk | contribs) (Hardware Word)
[Category:Computer Architecture]]
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Hardware Word

A word is the group of bits normally managed by a processor. The word size is a distinguishing feature of a processor, and is typically a power-of-two multiple of eight bits (8, 16, 32, or 64 bits), although some rare or early processors used different word sizes.

The word size is usually associated with the size of general-purpose registers and the amount of data read/written from/to memory at one time.