word – Tarik Billa

How many bits does a WORD contain in 32/64 bit OS respectively?

April 8, 2023 by Tarik

The concept of a “word” has several meanings. There’s 3 meanings embedded in the question. The generic term “processor word”, in context of CPU architectures The “bit size” of software/OS, vs the “bit size” of hardware The all-caps term WORD, meaning a 16 bit value – This is a part of the Windows “Win32” C … Read more

What does it mean by word size in computer?

February 22, 2023 by Tarik

“Word size” refers to the number of bits processed by a computer’s CPU in one go (these days, typically 32 bits or 64 bits). Data bus size, instruction size, address size are usually multiples of the word size. Just to confuse matters, for backwards compatibility, Microsoft Windows API defines a WORD as being 16 bits, … Read more