6. The greatest value_____may be of 8, 16, 32, 64 bits.
Answers
Answer:
Hey mates
Here is the answer
Explanation:
What does it mean for a CPU to be 8, 16, 32, or 64 bit? What is going on inside of it that makes it that number of bits and does that mean that a byte for that machine is that number of bits?
It refers to the size of operands that CPU can process in a single arithmetic instruction. This is to say, it’s a design decision made by the team of engineers who designed the CPU and laid down the logic for electric circuits.
For example, if a CPU is 32-bit, then it can add two 32-bit numbers together in a single instruction. The result is another 32-bit number. The operands, as well as result can be either in registers or in main memory.
If a CPU is 64-bit, then it can add two 64-bit numbers in a single instruction.
A 8-bit number can be between 0 and 255. A 16-bit number can be between 0 and 65535. A 32-bit number can be between 0 and 4294967295. A 64-bit number can be between 0 and 18446744073709551615. So more bits make it possible to work with larger numbers.
Of course, you can also add 64-bit numbers piecewise using 32-bit registers at a time, or even using 8 bits at a time. You just need correspondingly more instructions, store intermediate results somewhere and take care of carry-over bits. The total time to execute multiple instructions will be correspondingly longer than time to execute single instruction. So it’s not that 64-bit CPU can do something that others can’t, it’s simply faster if you are doing a lot of operations with 64-bit numbers.
If you took a microscope and inspected the logical circuits etched in the silicon, you would see 64 parallel wires going into 64 logic gates. Most likely (but not neccessarily), those 64 parallel wires on the silicon will also be reflected in 64 pins on the CPU package.
A CPU can actually use different number of bits/wires for different things. For example, it can use 16 bits for integer operations, 64 bits for floating point operations and 32 bits for addressing memory. Designers are free people and nobody can tell them what they must do. In such cases, you need more words to properly describe the CPU.
Now, before you go on and ask why we are not using 128-bit CPUs, please use the search button. This question has been asked and answered to death already on Quora. Short answer: it doesn’t pay off.
A byte is a unit of measurement and is always defined as 8 bits. It doesn’t have anything to do with CPUs or anything else.