Question

What is Byte Addressable and Word Addressable  means in computer Architecture ? Difference between them with examples?

I also find some sources like stack overflow and wikipedia ? But still i couln't able to understand

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2724449/different-between-word-addressable-and-byte-addressable

Answer 1

I will explain this by example

suppose,

you have a 128 KB memory if the memory is byte addressable then

no of bits for a physical address is 17 bit.

if the memory is a word addressable and word size is 4B then it is converted first converted to word 128KB/ 4B = 32KB then no. of bits for a physical address is 15 bit.

Answer 2

Byte addressable - To represent word in memory computer uses Bytes of code. i.e. called Byte Addressable

Word Addressable- It represents ordered Byte in a word.

If a memory block has 16 B  word of data

and it is 8B word addressable

Then there are only 16/8 =2 words

Answer 3

Memory is represented in BYTES as word will give ambiguity but operations are processed in word addressable.