Old School Monday: RAM Explained
Old School Monday: RAM Explained
Posted 05/16/2011 at 3:35pm
| by The Maximum PC Staff
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Here at Maximum PC, we carry over some of boot's best traditions - among them the white paper, which explains key aspects of technology and advancements in the field, because understanding the inner workings of tech is what really separates the nerds from the normals, the hard-core from the hardly-informed, the PC master from the PC user.
We've done so many of them now that sometimes it's a struggle to find new technologies. That wasn't always the case though--in 1997 we wrote our first white paper about a topic that's as fundamental to computing as you can get: RAM. Read on to see what we wrote, and tell us what kind of tech you'd like to see a white paper on in the comments!
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CalDrumr
May 18, 2011 at 12:19am
EDO RAM is growing in popularity. Hahaha. Nice. I love reading some of these old ads, papers, and reviews. It's like a snap shot of the technological past.
szore
May 17, 2011 at 1:10pm
Please tell me why we need SATA interface with 3 or 6 GB/S when the freaking HD can only read at around 250 / 300 meg/s?
CHR15x94
May 17, 2011 at 2:23pm
SATA (and most other standards, companies, etc.) often express their speeds in bits, rather than bytes (Lower case b = bits, upper case = bytes). 1Byte = 8bits. This makes their speeds look much better at first glance than they actually are.
So SATA 3 (runs at 6Gb/s) actually transfers at ~750MB/s.
And as illusionslayer mentioned, SSDs are getting stupid fast.
szore
May 17, 2011 at 3:51pm
Thanx for pointing out the obvious. But it still seems like too much. Is there any benefit to 6gbs? I have a 6gb/s drive and it doesent run any faster. So the question still remains. Its hype, isn't it? (Until SSD's get faster).
Thanx.
DDRDiesel
May 24, 2011 at 1:08pm
Certain SSD's have already been reaching speeds of up to 500MB/s (5gb/s) on a SATA 3 (6gb/s) interface (Reference the OCZ Vertex/Solid/Agility 3 series). if you have the necessary hardware, you can take advantage of these speeds at a relatively low(er) price than what they used to cost
CHR15x94
May 17, 2011 at 4:30pm
Yeah, pretty much. Unless you have a very high end SSD (one that reads at over 350MB/s or so), there's no benefit. But waiting until drive speeds exceed their interface doesn't work. Better off preparing for things to come.
Timmmer
May 17, 2011 at 9:52am
I would like to have a better understanding of how commands issued to the PC are interpreted so that actions take place in the proper component. For example, the proper video goes to the video card (GPU), the proper commands generate sound from the soundcard, the CPU computes the proper instruction etc. How does the CPU know which part of the equation belongs to it to accomplish vs the GPU.
CHR15x94
May 17, 2011 at 12:31pm
Timmmer, it's mainly controlled by the programmer. They have to keep track of what is CPU code, GPU code, data, etc. If the programmer tells the CPU to jump into a region filled with data or GPU code, the CPU will do just that. It won't be pretty but the CPU will do what it's told, it has little or no extra logic.
BUT, more modern CPU architectures often allow memory to be divided into code or data. x86, PowerPC, etc., divide their memory into "segments" (chunks of memory, basically) and will have the CPU and MMU (memory management unit) track down if the CPU tries to execute code from a data segment. If it does, an exception will be thrown, the CPU will stop executing the code it was trying to execute (the code that tried to run "code" in a data segment), and will jump to an exception handler (code to deal with the error).
Hopefully that helps answer your question. :D I'd be happy to answer anymore.
Timmmer
May 17, 2011 at 1:13pm
Thanks CHR15x94, you just reminded me of what it's like to be the average user of a computer again =). I know how my mother feels now when I am rattling off how to recover a file she deleted like it is common knowledge.
It always amazes me that for all that I know about computers, for all that I have learned, there is still so much more that I don't know.
Thumper092486
May 17, 2011 at 6:42am
More info on the inner workings on the PSU, CPU, GPU would be awesome!
szore
May 17, 2011 at 5:40am
How about a white paper on the internet in general? Its all voodoo to me...
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