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In a computer using virtual memory, accessing the location corresponding to a memory address may involve many levels. 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 ...
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.
When reading from memory, data addressed by MAR is fed into the MDR (memory data register) and then used by the CPU. When writing to memory, the CPU writes data from MDR to the memory location whose address is stored in MAR. MAR, which is found inside the CPU, goes either to the RAM (random-access memory) or cache.
A memory pointer (or just pointer) is a primitive, the value of which is intended to be used as a memory address; it is said that a pointer points to a memory address. It is also said that a pointer points to a datum [in memory] when the pointer's value is the datum's memory address.
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.
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A memory buffer register (MBR) or memory data register (MDR) is the register in a computer's CPU that stores the data being transferred to and from the immediate access storage. It was first implemented in von Neumann model. It contains a copy of the value in the memory location specified by the memory address register.