Byte addressing is hardware that allows individual bytes to be accessed from memory. The alternative, is word addressing whereby a machine only allows access to small chunks of data known as words. Words are typically 16 to 64 bits whereas a byte is 8 bits. The following are common characteristics of byte addressable machines.
Fine Grained Access
You can store and access a single byte in memory.
Memory Addresses
Word addressing allows more memory with the same length of memory address. This isn't much of an issue for modern byte addressable architectures with 64-bit memory addresses as they can still address up to 16 exbibytes.
Bus
Another way that byte addressing is potentially inefficient is that modern architectures have a 32-bit or 64-bit bus that returns more than 8-bits at a time.
Text vs Binary
Generally speaking, byte addressing is useful for storing text as character encodings such as UTF-8 use 8-bit characters for most text. Byte addressing is less useful for storing large data blobs such as an image.
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