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Word
,→Hardware Word
A ''hardware 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 [[Register|registers]] and the amount of data read from or written to memory at one time. Most modern processors can read/write alternate word sizes (for example, a "64-bit" x86_64 system can also read/write 32, 16, and 8 bit values to/from memory, and 64-bit registers can be accessed as 32, 16, or 8-bit subsets). Additionally, many modern systems use a different memory word size than CPU word size (for example, a "64-bit" system may be built to read/write memory 128 bits at a time), but this is transparent to the programmer and user.
== Common Names for Various Word Sizes ==