Today’s high performance microprocessors operate at speeds that far outpace even the fastest of the memory bus architectures that are commonly available. One of the biggest limitations of main memory is the wait state: period of time between operations.
| This means that during the wait states the processor waits for the memory to be ready for the next operation. The figure shows the gap between processor and memory performance. |
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To keep up with the speed of processors, a memory hierarchy is used as shown below. It consists of multiple levels of memory with different speeds and sizes. The faster memories are more expensive per bit than the slower memories and thus are smaller.
| Review: Computer Memory |
Cache Hard drives RAM (random access memory) SSD (solid state drives) |
| Result: |