Search results
Results from the WOW.Com Content Network
In most computers, the unit is either a character (e.g. a byte) or a word. (A few computers have used bit resolution.) If the unit is a word, then a larger amount of memory can be accessed using an address of a given size at the cost of added complexity to access individual characters.
A CPU cache is a hardware cache used by the central processing unit (CPU) of a computer to reduce the average cost (time or energy) to access data from the main memory. [1] A cache is a smaller, faster memory, located closer to a processor core, which stores copies of the data from frequently used main memory locations.
The gap between processor speed and main memory speed has grown exponentially. Until 2001–05, CPU speed, as measured by clock frequency, grew annually by 55%, whereas memory speed only grew by 7%. [1] This problem is known as the memory wall. The motivation for a cache and its hierarchy is to bridge this speed gap and overcome the memory wall.
A CPU cache [71] is a hardware cache used by the central processing unit (CPU) of a computer to reduce the average cost (time or energy) to access data from the main memory. A cache is a smaller, faster memory, closer to a processor core, which stores copies of the data from frequently used main memory locations.
Therefore, the choice of the base b determines the unit used to measure information. In particular, if b is a positive integer, then the unit is the amount of information that can be stored in a system with b possible states. When b is 2, the unit is the shannon, equal to the information content of one "bit".
If needed, contents of the computer memory can be transferred to storage; a common way of doing this is through a memory management technique called virtual memory. Modern computer memory is implemented as semiconductor memory, [5] [6] where data is stored within memory cells built from MOS transistors and other components on an integrated ...
Virtual memory combines active RAM and inactive memory on DASD [a] to form a large range of contiguous addresses.. In computing, virtual memory, or virtual storage, [b] is a memory management technique that provides an "idealized abstraction of the storage resources that are actually available on a given machine" [3] which "creates the illusion to users of a very large (main) memory".
Registers are normally measured by the number of bits they can hold, for example, an 8-bit register, 32-bit register, 64-bit register, 128-bit register, or more.In some instruction sets, the registers can operate in various modes, breaking down their storage memory into smaller parts (32-bit into four 8-bit ones, for instance) to which multiple data (vector, or one-dimensional array of data ...