There are several ways to organise
memories with respect to the way they are connected to the
cache:
# one-word-wide memory organisation
# wide memory organisation
#
interleaved memory organisation
# independent memory organisation
One-Word-Wide
The memory is one
word
A word is a basic element of language that carries an objective or practical meaning, can be used on its own, and is uninterruptible. Despite the fact that language speakers often have an intuitive grasp of what a word is, there is no consen ...
wide and connected via a one word wide
bus
A bus (contracted from omnibus, with variants multibus, motorbus, autobus, etc.) is a road vehicle that carries significantly more passengers than an average car or van. It is most commonly used in public transport, but is also in use for cha ...
to the cache.
Wide
The memory is more than one word wide (usually four words wide) and connected by an equally wide bus to the low level cache (which is also wide). From the cache multiple busses of one word wide go to a
MUX which selects the correct bus to connect to the high level cache.
Interleaved
There are several memory banks which are one word wide, and one word wide bus. There is some logic in the memory that selects the correct bank to use when the memory gets accessed by the cache.
Memory interleaving is a way to distribute individual addresses over memory modules. Its aim is to keep the most of modules busy as computations proceed. With memory interleaving, the low-order ''k'' bits of the memory address generally specify the module on several buses.
Computer memory
See also
*
Cache hierarchy
*
Memory hierarchy
*
Memory geometry
In the design of modern computers, memory geometry describes the internal structure of random-access memory. Memory geometry is of concern to consumers upgrading their computers, since older memory controllers may not be compatible with later prod ...
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