
432 THE x86 MICROPROCESSORS
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, fi rst, let us discuss some general aspects of semiconductor memories. Data is stored
in memory, and it is usually defi ned to be ‘byte oriented’ (in most cases). is means that one
address corresponds to one byte of memory. us, when one address is accessed, one byte is
either read or written into it.
Reading and writing takes a certain amount of time and that is termed as ‘memory access
time’. For reading, this is the time inter ...