I have been trying to understand segmented memory and I came across this statement on this website: website. The first sentence is the most confusing to me..
“Interesting to note is the fact that although segments are 64KB in size, they are spaced 16 bytes apart in memory. This should make perfect sense to you if you understand the procedure taken by the processor when it calculates physical addresses in real-mode. Since the content of a segment register forms the 16 high-order bits of a physical address, it is always divisible by 16 and has its lowest four bits set to zero.”
I don’t understand how 64KB segments are spaced only 16 bytes apart…
It is a confusing statement. What it’s really saying is that the value in a segment register behaves as if there are 4 zero bits after it; that is, a segment address 0345H corresponds to the physical address 03450H.