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[[Category:Computer Architecture]]{{Chris Tyler Draft}}
An '''address''' is the numeric identifier for a memory location. The term may also be used for other storage allocation identifiers -- for example, a '''logical block address''' on a disk identifies a block or sector on that disk using a unique number.
It is not necessary to fully populate the address space -- a computer with a 32-bit address bus may only have 1GB of installed memory. Reading unpopulated memory locations will typically lead to undefined results.
On almost all modern systems, addresses refer to individual bytes within the memory system, but the memory is usually not physically arranged in bytes. See [[Computer_Architecture#Sub-word_and_Unaligned_Access|sub-word and unaligned access]] for more information.