CHAPTER 8: MEMORY ORGANIZATION (PART 1)

Undoubtedly, memory unit is really an essential component in computers nowadays as it is needed for storing programs and data. Information stored in memory devices can be divided into bits, bytes, words, blocks, segments, pages and other larger data structures, which have their own identifiers. There are various types of memory devices that are united under memory organization.

First of them is memory hierarchy. 

Memory hierarchy is to obtain the highest possible access speed while minimizing the total cost of the memory system. CPU logic is usually faster than main memory access time but the processing speed is limited. The cache memory is used for storing temporary data frequently need in present calculations. The typical access time between the cache memory and main memory is about 1 to 7. While auxiliary memory access time is 1000 times of main memory time.

Memory Hierarchy

Second of all is main memory. 

Main memory is a memory unit that communicates directly with the CPU which consists of two types of device which is RAM and ROM.

RAM stands for Random Access Memory and ROM stands for Read Only Memory. Both of them have same size, but it is possible to have more bits of ROM than RAM because the internal binary cells in ROM occupy less space than in RAM.

RAM and ROM

Next, let me introduce you to Auxiliary memory.
It is also called as Secondary memory which can store large chunks of data at a lesser cost per byte than a primary memory for backup. The most common form of auxiliary memory devices used is flash memory, magnetic disk, magnetic type and optical disk.

So now we're going to know about associative memory.

It is accessed by contents that is why we're known as associative or content addressable memory (CAM).