What is the history of why bytes are eight bits?
What were the historical forces at work, the tradeoffs to make, in deciding to use groups of eight bits as the fundamental unit? There were machines, once upon a time, using other word sizes. …
How does it matter if a character is 8 bit or 16 bit or 32 bit
Jul 23, 2012 · 2 Unicode is logically a 21-bit code. As modern computers don’t conveniently work with such units, there are various solutions: use 32 bits (4 bytes), wasting a lot of bits, …
How are negative signed values stored? - Software Engineering …
So it is easily interpreted as +1. Now take an example of a negative signed value - 1000 0000 which comes out to be -8. Okay, the computer can understand that it is a negative value …
bit - Why are CPUs' datapaths multiple of 8? - Software …
Apr 30, 2017 · Current and common processing units are 8, 16, 32, 64, 128, etc bit. Why are their datapath multiple of 8 ? Is this all linked to the fact that the industry has settled with a 8-bit …
In C++, Why do bitwise operators convert 8 or 16 bit integers to …
May 27, 2020 · Is there a logical reason why the integer is upgraded to 32+ bits? I was trying to make an 8bit mask, and found myself a bit disappointed that the upgrade will corrupt my …
cpu - Memory Alignment - Software Engineering Stack Exchange
Oct 6, 2022 · The missing piece here could be that some instruction sets actually allow you to specify an 8-bit byte address and because of their implementations aligned accesses are …
What is the advantage of choosing ASCII encoding over UTF-8?
Perhaps you were thinking of ASCII which is 7-bit and a proper subset of UTF-8. I.e. any valid ASCII stream is also a valid UTF-8 stream. If you were thinking of 8-bit character sets, one …
history - Why is int in C in practice at least a 32 bit type today ...
Oct 23, 2023 · When 32-bit processors (Intel 386) and 32-operating systems (Linux, Windows NT) got popular, C compilers switched to 32-bit int. However, int did not change during the 32- to …
How to align on both word size and cache lines in x86
Aug 22, 2018 · From what it sounds like, a 64 bit processor means aligning to 64 bits, which means if you have unicode utf-8 stored in there, each 8-bit chunk would take up 64 bits of …
How Are RAM Memory Addresses Determined
Apr 24, 2021 · How are physical memory addresses actually determined or 'created'. What is the process where the byte blocks have a memory address assigned to it? I understand that this is …