Question

Suppose a computer architecture allows for 32 bit addresses, how many memory cells can be addressed at most in this system? If memory is to be word-addressable (each cell is a word) and the architecture uses 32 bit words, how large is the memory space?

Answer 1

A 32-bit address computer system can address 2³² memory cells, or 4,294,967,296 words. If it's word-addressable with 32-bit words, the total memory space is 16 gigabytes.

Step-by-step explanation:

In a computer architecture with 32-bit addresses, the maximum number of memory cells that can be addressed is 2³². This is because each bit can represent two states, and with 32 bits, you can have 2³² unique combinations, which equals 4,294,967,296.

If the system is word-addressable and uses 32-bit words, then the total memory space that can be addressed is 4,294,967,296 words. Since each word is 4 bytes (32 bits), the total memory space in bytes is 4,294,967,296 words multiplied by 4 bytes per word, which equals 17,179,869,184 bytes or 16 gigabytes.