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Old Aug 13th, 2007, 8:42 PM   #10
lectricpharaoh
Caffeinated Neural Net
 
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Think of it this way. Imagine you have one of those CD players that can hold 200 discs. Thus, you can say that it has an addressing range of 200 units (discs, in this case). The unit can, however, only play (process) one disc at a time, much as the 8-bit processor can only process byte values.

The data bus dictates the size of operands, ie memory quantities (and often, but not always, register width). The address bus dictates the number of memory operands that can be accessed- not how many can be accessed at once, but how many can be accessed, period.

Remember that the data bus determiens the size, in bits, but the address bus determines the number of locations. Each location is typically several bits (often eight), and called a byte. A byte is the smallest quantity that you can address directly; if you want to access an individual bit within that byte, you must use bit-fiddling instructions (bit-shifting, AND/OR/XOR, etc).

One last thing: learn to edit your posts when you want to add content three minutes after your last post. It's much better that seeing five posts in the same thread from the same person in a five-minute span.
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