Sign Up to our social questions and Answers Engine to ask questions, answer people’s questions, and connect with other people.
Login to our social questions & Answers Engine to ask questions answer people’s questions & connect with other people.
Lost your password? Please enter your email address. You will receive a link and will create a new password via email.
Please briefly explain why you feel this question should be reported.
Please briefly explain why you feel this answer should be reported.
Please briefly explain why you feel this user should be reported.
I was reading about bit array and this question came up in my mind.
Why are most machines not able to address individual bits? Is it because of the DMA and because it would be too (memory/circuits) expensive to keep an address for each bit?
A bit is the smallest unit of storage in memory.
A byte is the smallest addressable unit of storage in memory.
It doesn’t make sense to make the bit addressable as it can only contain a
1or0i.e.trueorfalseinformation unlike a byte which can carry meaningfull information (you can encode a character set based on one byte e.g. ASCII).This is just an intuitive explanation. I assume there are other techical low level reasons, e.g. it doesn’t make sense to access memory for just 1 bit (too costly), i.e. make a 1-bit memory bus instead of 8-16 or more bits etc