
12-2
x86 MICROPROCESSORS
RAM, so if there is not sufficient amount of RAM, the processor will have to make trips to
the secondary memory, and that is painful in terms of speed. However, the cost factor pre-
vents a large amount of RAM to be included in any system. (Of course, there is the ‘cache’
also which contributes to speed, but that is another story, which we will soon come to.)
12.1 | Semiconductor Memory
However, first, let us discuss some general aspects of semiconductor memories. Data
is stored in memory, and it is usually defined to be ‘byte oriented’ (in most cases). This
means that one address corresponds to one byte of memory. Thus, ...