文章目录
Different Kinds of Memory
SRAM (made with logic gates)
- Fast: ~2ns access time
- Expensive, high area requirement
- ~$5.0 per megabyte
- $0.13 for LC2
- $20000 for MIPS
DRAM (transistor and capacitor)
- Slower: ~60ns access time
- Must stall for dozens of cycles on each memory load
- Less expensive than SRAM
- ~$0.004 per megabyte
- $0.00 for LC2
- $16 for MIPS/Pentium-IV/Athlon-XP
Flash (floating gate transistors)
- Slower still: ~250ns access time
- Must stall for dozens of cycles on each memory load
- Less expensive than SRAM
- ~$0.0012 per megabyte
- $0.00 for LC2
- $4.9 for MIPS/Pentium-IV/Athlon-XP
- Non-volatile
Disks (Mechanical, Giant Magnetoresistance GMR)
- Obnoxiously slow: 3,000,000ns (3 ms) access time
- Cheap
- ~$0.000043 per megabyte
- $0.00 LC2
- $0.18 for MIPS
- Non-volatile
Memory Hierarchy Goals
Hierarchical Memory
- A small array of SRAM
- Small so fast and cheap
- Cache (hopefully covers most loads and stores)
- A larger amount of DRAM
- Cheaper than SRAM, faster than flash/disk
- Main Memory
- A lot of flash and/or disk
- Non-volatile. Cheap. Big
flash and/or disk - Non-volatile. Cheap. Big
- Virtual Memory
- Non-volatile. Cheap. Big