Question

Consider the following hypothetical microprocessor. Assume this processor uses a 32-bit address and 32-bit data bus. What is the memory capacity when connected to a 16-bit memory? Show your work and give your final answer in Bytes.

Answer 1

//do comment if further clarification needed

Assuming byte addressable scheme

Given processor has 32 bit address bus

So max memory supported = 2³² bytes = 4294967296 bytes

But the connected memory has only 16 bits for address

So, memory capacity = 2¹⁶ bytes = 65536

If Processor is word addressable

then word size = 32 bits = 4 bytes

This means that 4 bytes can fit into 1 memory location

Then for connected memory of 16 bits

memory capacity = 2¹⁶ x 4 bytes = 262144 bytes