How many words can be in the address space?

Question

Here is the problem I'm working on

Problem: A high-speed workstation has 64-bit words and 64-bit addresses with address resolution at the byte level. How many words can be in the address space of a workstation?

I defined the various members in the task

• Word Size - The natural processor block of data. The size of a word determines the amount of information that can be processed at a time.
• Byte Level Addressing - Hardware architectures that support access to individual bytes in a word
• 64-bit addressing - You have 64 bits to indicate an address in Runtime memory that contains instructions or data
• Address space - Launch programmatic representation of memory in the system

How could you use all of these definitions to solve this problem?

From 64 bits I know that technically there are 2 ^ 64 places in memory and from 64-bit words that the processor processes 8 bytes. But I do not know how to use this information to conclude how many words are in the address space of a computer.

Answer 1

Thanks to aruisdante comment, I was able to figure this out.

Basically 64-bit addresses mean that there are 2 ^ 64 shared addresses. Since the address memory of the byte is used here, each address will store one byte.

This means that a total of 2 ^ 64 bytes can be stored in the address space. The problem tells you that the machine has 64-bit words or that each word is 8 bytes long. Therefore, you have 2 ^ 64/8 or 2 ^ 64/2 ^ 3 = 2 ^ 61 words in the address space.