Fine Grained Access
You can store and access a single byte in memory.Memory Addresses
Word addressing allows more memory with the same length of memory address. This isn't much of an issue for modern byte addressable architectures with 64-bit memory addresses as they can still address up to 16 exbibytes.Bus
Another way that byte addressing is potentially inefficient is that modern architectures have a 32-bit or 64-bit bus that returns more than 8-bits at a time.Text vs Binary
Generally speaking, byte addressing is useful for storing text as character encodings such as UTF-8 use 8-bit characters for most text. Byte addressing is less useful for storing large data blobs such as an image.| Overview: Byte Addressing | ||
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Definition | Computing hardware that allows individual bytes to be accessed from memory. | |
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