Memory bank

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A memory bank is a logical unit of storage in electronics, which is hardware dependent. In computer the memory bank may be determined by the memory access controller and the CPU along with physical organization of the hardware memory slots. In a typical SDRAM or DDR SDRAM, a bank consists of multiple rows and columns of storage units and is usually spread out in several chips. The columns are equally segmented in this way. The columns in each chip add up to be the columns in one bank, and therefore bits per column per row × columns per bank = memory bus width in bits (single channel).

Some computers have several identical memory banks of RAM, and use bank switching to switch between them.

Harvard architecture computers have (at least) 2 very different banks of memory, one for program storage and one for data storage.

In caching

Memory bank is a part of (cache) memory that is addressed consecutively in the total set of memory banks, i.e., when data item a(n) is stored in bank b, data item a(n + 1) is stored in bank b + 1. (Cache) memory is divided in banks to evade the effects of the bank cycle time (see above). When data is stored or retrieved consecutively each bank has enough time to recover before the next request for that bank arrives. [1]

The number of memory modules needed to have the same number of data bits as the bus. A bank can consist of one or more memory modules.

Other meanings

Memory bank may also mean:

See also

References

  1. ^ "Glossary". Overview of Recent Supercomputers. Retrieved 26 August 2011.