The Memory Hierarchy
The role of memory is to hold instructions and data until they are requested
by the processor (or, some devices).
While it is easy to make a case for as much memory as possible,
having too much can be wasteful (financially) if it is not all required.
We also expect memory to be able to provide the necessary data, as quickly
as possible, when called upon. Unfortunately, there is a traditional
trade-off between cost, capacity, and access time:
- the faster the access time, the greater the cost per bit,
- the greater the capacity, the smaller the cost per bit and,
the greater the capacity, the slower the access time.
CITS2002 Systems Programming, Lecture 6, p5, 7th August 2024.
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CITS2002
