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Memory Locations and Addresses

The document explains memory locations and addresses, detailing how memory consists of storage cells that can hold bits, with groups of bits forming words of information. It discusses byte addressability, defining bits and bytes, their values, and their usage in data representation. Additionally, it covers endianness, describing big-endian and little-endian byte arrangements in memory.

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kanishkasp2006
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7 views11 pages

Memory Locations and Addresses

The document explains memory locations and addresses, detailing how memory consists of storage cells that can hold bits, with groups of bits forming words of information. It discusses byte addressability, defining bits and bytes, their values, and their usage in data representation. Additionally, it covers endianness, describing big-endian and little-endian byte arrangements in memory.

Uploaded by

kanishkasp2006
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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Download as PPTX, PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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Memory Locations and

Addresses
• The memory consists of many millions of storage cells, each of which
can store a bit of information having the value 0 or 1
• groups of fixed size
• group of n bits can be stored or retrieved in a single, basic operation.
Each group of n bits is referred to as a word of information, and n is
called the word length
• 16 to 64 bits
• A unit of 8 bits is called a byte
• Accessing the memory to store or retrieve a single item of
information, either a word or a byte, requires distinct names or
addresses for each location.
• 0 to 2k − 1, for some suitable value of k, as the addresses of
successive locations in the memory.
• Thus, the memory can have up to 2k addressable locations. The 2k
addresses constitute the address space of the computer.
• For example, a 24-bit address generates an address space of
(16,777,216) locations.
Byte Addressability
• Bits
• Definition: A bit (short for “binary digit”) is the
smallest unit of data in a computer.
• Value: It can have a value of either 0 or 1.
• Usage: Bits are used to represent binary data and are
the building blocks for all types of data in a computer.
• Bytes
• Definition: A byte is a group of 8 bits.
• Value: Since a byte consists of 8 bits, it can represent
256 different values (from 0 to 255).
• Usage: Bytes are used to measure data storage and
memory. For example, file sizes and memory capacities
are often measured in bytes, kilobytes (KB), megabytes
(MB), gigabytes (GB), etc.
• Bit: 0 or 1
• Byte: 10101010 (an example of a byte with 8 bits)
• Example
• Let’s say you have the letter ‘A’. In binary, ‘A’ is represented as 01000001.
This is a byte because it consists of 8 bits.

• Key Differences
• Size: A bit is the smallest unit, while a byte is larger and consists of 8 bits.
• Representation: Bits are used for binary data, while bytes are used for larger
data units like characters, numbers, and more complex data structures.
Big-Endian and Little-Endian
Assignments
• What is Endianness?
• Endianness refers to the order in which bytes are
arranged in memory.
• It’s like how we read text in different languages: some
read left to right (like English), and some read right to
left (like Arabic). Similarly, computers can store data in
different byte orders.
• big-endian is used when lower byte addresses are used for the more
significant bytes (the leftmost bytes) of the word.

• The name little-endian is used for the opposite ordering, where the
lower byte addresses are used for the less significant bytes (the
rightmost bytes) of the word.

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