Octets calculation?
Peter Hansen
peter at engcorp.com
Wed Jun 11 22:06:09 EDT 2003
Erik Max Francis wrote:
>
> Skip Montanaro wrote:
>
> > It's not uncommon for a machine word to be 16 or 32 bits, but it's
> > rare
> > these days for a byte to be anything other than 8 bits.
>
> No, I'm referring to embedded systems where the smallest addressable
> unit really is 16 or 32 bits. In those systems, a byte is larger than
> an octet.
I believe it's more common to call the smallest addressable unit
a "word" in embedded systems. The PIC family, for example, has members
with a 14-bit word, and it would be unusual to hear it called a byte.
Maybe the convention with other chip families is different though. I
usually work only with 8-bit word, 16-bit address range chips.
CDROMs apparently store 8-bit bytes using a 14-bit modulation scheme
which is called a "byte", however so it's probably going to get no
one anywhere to argue about this.
-Peter
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