Memory
Memory
Memory units in computers are used to store bits. This could be bits representing vari
ables in your program, or bits representing the pixels of an image. Thus, the abstraction
of a memory unit applies to the registers in your motherboard as well as your RAM and
hard drive. The one major difference between all of these types of memory units is the
speed at which they can read/write data. To make things more complicated, the read/
write speed is heavily dependent on the way that data is being read.
For example, most memory units perform much better when they read one large chunk
of data as opposed to many small chunks (this is referred to as sequential read versus
random data). If the data in these memory units is thought of like pages in a large book,
this means that most memory units have better read/write speeds when going through
the book page by page rather than constantly flipping from one random page to another.