4.6 MEMORY ORGANIZATION AND ADDRESSING

We saw an example of rather small memory in Chapter 3. In this chapter, we continue to refer to very small memory sizes (so small that any reasonable person today would consider them to be ridiculously small in any modern computing device). However, smaller memories make the numbers manageable, and the principles we discuss in this chapter apply to small and large memories alike. These principles include how memory is laid out and how it is addressed. It is important that you have a good understanding of these concepts before we continue.

You can envision memory as a matrix of bits. Each row, implemented by a register, has a length typically equivalent to the addressable unit size of the machine. Each register ...

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