Search results
Results from the WOW.Com Content Network
In computing, a memory address is a reference to a specific memory location in memory used by both software and hardware. [1] These addresses are fixed-length sequences of digits , typically displayed and handled as unsigned integers .
In a computer, the memory address register (MAR) [1] is the CPU register that either stores the memory address from which data will be fetched to the CPU registers, or the address to which data will be sent and stored via system bus.
Diagram of relationship between the virtual and physical address spaces. In computing, a physical address (also real address, or binary address), is a memory address that is represented in the form of a binary number on the address bus circuitry in order to enable the data bus to access a particular storage cell of main memory, or a register of memory-mapped I/O device.
The DMA command is issued by specifying a pair of a local address and a remote address: for example when a SPE program issues a put DMA command, it specifies an address of its own local memory as the source and a virtual memory address (pointing to either the main memory or the local memory of another SPE) as the target, together with a block size.
A memory address a is said to be n-byte aligned when a is a multiple of n (where n is a power of 2). In this context, a byte is the smallest unit of memory access, i.e. each memory address specifies a different byte. An n-byte aligned address would have a minimum of log 2 (n) least-significant zeros when expressed in binary.
An address bus is a bus that is used to specify a physical address. When a processor or DMA-enabled device needs to read or write to a memory location, it specifies that memory location on the address bus (the value to be read or written is sent on the data bus). The width of the address bus determines the amount of memory a system can address.
An iconic example of virtual-to-physical address translation is virtual memory, where different pages of virtual address space map either to page file or to main memory physical address space. It is possible that several numerically different virtual addresses all refer to one physical address and hence to the same physical byte of RAM.
Hence, a microprocessor with 12-bit memory addresses can directly access 4096 words (4 kW) of word-addressable memory. IBM System/360 instruction formats use a 12-bit displacement field which, added to the contents of a base register, can address 4096 bytes of memory in a region that begins at the address in the base register.