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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.