[TUHS] Any UNIX With No C In Userland?

[Luther Johnson]

Any CPU with only a byte-wide memory interface (e.g. 8088) doesn't care
about bigger word alignments. But yes, if the CPU can do 16 and 32 and
64 bits at a time, then aligned accesses of bigger words can be one
transaction instead of two.

On 03/03/2025 03:00 PM, Paul Winalski wrote:
> On Mon, Mar 3, 2025 at 1:28 PM Larry McVoy <lm at mcvoy.com
> <mailto:lm at mcvoy.com>> wrote:
>
>
>     Even x86, it would appear, wants to do aligned loads.  I'm a little
>     surprised by that though maybe I shouldn't be as there is a RISC
>     implemented by the microcode under the x86 CPU.
>
> I don't think there's ever been a CPU design where unaligned accesses
> run at the same speed as naturally aligned accesses.  The worst case
> is an unaligned access that straddles a machine-word boundary.
>
> -Paul W.
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