Memory Constraint

Introduction

Memory Latency

The measure of time delay to receive data from the memory system

Memory Bandwidth

The rate which the memory system can transfer data to the processor

Stalls

  • A processor stalls when it cannot run the next instruction because it depends on a previous instruction
  • The main source of stalls is “accessing memory” since this kinds of instruction is very time consuming (hundreds of clock cycles)

Cache

The goal of cache is to reduce memory latency