Can someone confirm what is correct? Tim and I were discussing memory addressing at Crepeville last night and we had a disagreement about how memory is addressable. I say that on today's common intel i386 32 bit architecture (in case you are one of those souls who builds your hardware from scratch), that memory is byte (octet) addressable. You can load a byte from memory into the lower 8 bits of a register. Tim says that memory is only addressable on 32 bit word boundaries.
Say you look at memory in bits and then on the left is the memory address. I say that memory is normally byte addressable and the addressing corresponds to byte (octet) boundaries. Address bits 0 0 7 15 23 31 3 0 7 15 23 31 7 0 7 15 23 31 11 0 7 15 23 31 15 0 7 15 23 31 Tim says that memory is only 32 bit word addressable Address bits 0 0 7 15 23 31 1 0 7 15 23 31 2 0 7 15 23 31 3 0 7 15 23 31 4 0 7 15 23 31 -- Brian Lavender http://www.brie.com/brian/ "There are two ways of constructing a software design. One way is to make it so simple that there are obviously no deficiencies. And the other way is to make it so complicated that there are no obvious deficiencies." Professor C. A. R. Hoare The 1980 Turing award lecture _______________________________________________ vox-tech mailing list vox-tech@lists.lugod.org http://lists.lugod.org/mailman/listinfo/vox-tech
