[wzdd]

> if you support byte-addressing you'd better as well be happy with byte-alignment

All ARM processors do this. The concept is called "natural alignment" and it's pretty common on non-x86. See e.g. http://infocenter.arm.com/help/index.jsp?topic=/com.arm.doc.... . The problem here is that a lot of code written for x86 wants more than that, e.g. byte addressing for non-byte-wide values.

[throwaway000002]

I understand. What I mean is that if your word-size is not your addressing-size, you'd better not have a concept of mis-aligned accesses. It's trouble you brought on all by yourself.

[tedunangst]

The cray did this, iirc, and the result was that char pointers were extra fat because they needed to include the word address and the byte address within the word. That's not an efficiency improvement.