The 386SX, which addresses memory in 8-bit units but can fetch and store it 16 bits at a time, is termed byte-addressable. The advantage of word addressing is that more memory can be addressed in the same number of bits. The IBM 7094 has 15-bit addresses, so could address 32,768 words of 36 bits.

Is memory byte addressable or word addressable?

In reality, memory is only byte addressable. It means: A binary address always points to a single byte only. A word is just a group of bytes – 2 , 4 , 8 depending upon the data bus size of the CPU.

What is memory addressable?

Content-addressable memory (CAM) is a special type of computer memory used in certain very-high-speed searching applications. It is also known as associative memory or associative storage and compares input search data against a table of stored data, and returns the address of matching data.