MEMORY HIERARCHY

MEMORY SYSTEM ORGANIZATION

AND ARCHITECTURE

• Memory systems hierarchy;

• Main memory organization,
– Types of Main memories, and its characteristics and
performance; Latency, cycle time, bandwidth, and
interleaving;
• Cache memories
(address mapping, line size, replacement and
write- back policies);
• Virtual memory systems;
• Reliability of memory systems;
• error detecting and error correcting systems.
 MEMORY HIERARCHY
• a memory system is a hierarchy of storage devices with
different capacities, costs, and access times.
• A 'memory hierarchy' in computer storage distinguishes
each level in the 'hierarchy' by response time.
• Since response time, complexity, and capacity are related,
the levels may also be distinguished by the controlling
technology.
 Memory Hierarchy
• Registers
– In CPU
• Internal or Main memory
– May include one or more levels of cache
– “RAM”
• External memory
– Backing store
Memory Hierarchy - Diagram
Tertiary storage or tertiary
memory,[4] provides a third
level of storage. Typically it
involves a robotic mechanism
which will mount (insert)
and dismount removable
mass storage media into a
storage device according to
the system's demands; this
data is often copied to
secondary storage before use
MEMORY
HIERARCHY

• Memory designers are able to trade speed for

capacity - the fastest memory (registers) having
access times below 10ns but the lowest capacity
(10s of words) and the slowest (magnetic tape)
having access times of several seconds but the
highest capacity (10s of G Bytes). Thus the
memory in a system can usually be arranged in a
hierarchy from the slowest (and highest capacity)
to the fastest (and lowest capacity).
MEMORY
HIERARCHY
CPU Registers Capacity Access time Cost/bit

Cache memory

Increasing Decreasing
Main memory

Auxiliary memory
 Hierarchy List
• Registers
• L1 Cache
• L2 Cache
• Main memory
• Disk cache
• Disk
• Optical
• Tape
REFERENCES

• William Stallings “Computer Organization and

architecture”, Prentice Hall, 7th edition, 2006.