Why is memory byte addressable and not bit addressable?

Why is memory byte addressable and not bit addressable?

The reason why the hardware isn’t bit addressable is the cost and complexity to address to that level of granularity isn’t justified. You need more wires the more accurately you address. A lot of computers aren’t really byte addressable either. They tend to move memory around in bigger chunks, 64 bytes is common.

Why is MIPs byte addressable?

for MIPs 32-bit, the main memory has a 32-bit address input bus, each slot in memory holds 8-bit, so each address can refer to 8-bits of memory (which is why its byte addressable); since register size is 32-bit, “words” in main memory start at every 4th byte (so that each word is 4 consecutive slots in memory – 4 * 8 = …

How does content-addressable memory work?

Content-addressable memory (CAM) is computer memory that operates like a hardware search engine for search-intensive applications. Data stored on CAM, on the other hand, can be accessed by searching for the content itself, and the memory retrieves the addresses where that content can be found.

What is bit addressable and byte addressable registers in 8051?

If you want to use a bit-addressable register, you can use a single bit (E0) of the register and you can use an 8-bit of the accumulator as a byte-addressable register. The accumulator holds the results of most Arithmetic and logical operations. The B-register is a bit and byte-addressable register.

What is bit addressable and byte addressable?

In Byte addressable we can only access the data by byte by byte i.e whole bunch of 8 bits. but in bit addressable addresses we can access or manipulate each bit individually.

Is physical memory byte addressable?

Physical memory is not really byte addressable at the hardware level – most modern DRAM has a really wide data bus, and will retrieve chunks of 64 to 128 bits at a time whether it is read or write.

Why is the associative memory also called as Content Addressable Memory?

Associative memory is often referred to as Content Addressable Memory (CAM). When a write operation is performed on associative memory, no address or memory location is given to the word. The memory itself is capable of finding an empty unused location to store the word.

What is binary content addressable memory?

Binary Content Addressable Memories (BCAMs), also known as associative memories, are hardware-based search engines. BCAMs employ a massively parallel exhaustive search of the entire memory space, and are capable of matching a specific data within a single cycle.