Home

[From the last episode: We looked at a basic computing system.] So far, we’ve seen that a computing system has to consist, at least, of a processor and some memory. And we’ve seen that there are different kinds of memories with different properties, and we may need some of all […]

[From the last episode: We looked at the role of cache memory in a processor.] Now that we’ve looked at the major components of a computing system, let’s put them together. We won’t talk about how we’re putting them together for the moment; that comes next. We’ll start with the […]

[From the last episode: We looked at subroutines in computer programs.] We saw a couple weeks ago that some memories are big, but slow (flash memory). Others are fast, but not so big – and they’re energy-hungry to boot (SRAM). This sets up an interesting problem. When the processor needs […]

[From the last episode: We looked at several kinds of memories that are used with processors.] Before we go on to our next memory topic, we need to step aside for a second to explain a fundamental programming concept for those of you that may never have done any programming. […]

[From the last episode: We saw how branch speculation can both save time and hurt long pipelines.] Before we talk more about processors, we need to take a look at memory. Pretty much no computing happens without some kind of memory. The thing is, there are different kinds of memory, […]