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I’m a beginner in the study of computer architecture, and that name made me a little curious. I’ve seen that there are word’s, doubleword’s and quadword’s. But why it gave name to 2 bytes and not 1 single byte?
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Word refers to the number of bits of a processor instruction. The processor you are studying appears to use 16 bits for your instructions. The word size is defined by the processor architecture, not something predefined as the byte that always has 8 bits.
Here is a tablet with several processors and their respective word sizes: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Word_(computer_architecture)#Table_of_word_sizes
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I think it’s an old nomenclature. There were old computers where the minimum addressable memory unit was 16-bit words and not bytes.
– anonimo
By the way, why call 1 byte of word if it is already called byte? xD
– Woss