< architecture > The brain damaged addressing scheme used on the Intel 8086 and later Intel microprocessors (and maybe others(?)) where all memory references are formed by adding a 16-bit offset to a 16-bit base address held in one of four segment base registers. Each instruction has a default segment (code (CS), data (DS), stack (SS), ? (ES)) which determines which segment register is used. Special prefix instructions allow this default to be overridden.
The effect is to segment memory into blocks, of 64 kilobytes in the case of the Intel processors. Blocks may overlap either partially or completely, depending on the contents of the segment registers but normally they would be distinct to give access to the maximum total range of addresses. In this case the scheme does provide some degree of memory protection within a single process since, for example, a data reference cannot affect an area of memory containing code. However, compilers must either generate slower code or code with artificial limits on the size of data structures .
Opposite: flat address space . See also addressing mode .
(1996-12-21)