From the course: Getting Started with RISC-V

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Memory access

Memory access

- [Instructor] Two of the main components of a computational system are the CPU, which executes instructions, and the memory, which contains the data manipulated by the programs. These two elements are usually located in two different integrated circuits created with different technologies. Since programs manipulate data, it follows that a computer system is at most as fast as the slowest of these two elements. The slowest one will become a bottleneck. Well, when the first microprocessors came out in the early 1970s, memory chips were more than capable of working at the speed of microprocessors. So the microprocessor was the bottleneck dictating the speed of the system. Back in the day, processors ran at clock frequencies often below one megahertz, which roughly translates to less than 100,000 memory operations per second. In time, the microprocessor technology showed an exponential growth in computational speed, a…

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