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From: 451061@UOTTAWA.BITNET (Valentin Pepelea)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga
Subject: Re: Memory question
Message-ID: <8908111841.AA22482@jade.berkeley.edu>
Date: 11 Aug 89 18:33:44 GMT
Sender: daemon@ucbvax.BERKELEY.EDU
Lines: 22

"F. Michael Theilig" 
writes in Message-ID: <21467@louie.udel.EDU>

>      It is my understanding that each memory location is 8 bits wide
>  even on a 16 bit machine.  And that this holds true for 32 bit machines.
>  What (without getting TOO technical) is the difference between 16 and 32
>  bit RAM?  Someone refered to 32 bit RAM as being wider.  I'm confused.

Each memory location contains a byte. (8 bits) On 16-bit systems, you can
read or write 16 bits at a time. (2 bytes) On 32-bit systems, you can access
32 bits at a time. That is much faster, because the hardware has to specify
the address accessed only once instead of 4 times. Depending on the
architecture, it is also much faster to access 32-bit data on 4-byte aligned
an instant address error. (That's Guru 00000003 for you and me)

Valentin
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