Adding RAM

Tony Arnold tony.arnold at manchester.ac.uk
Fri Oct 13 21:55:16 UTC 2006


On Sat, 2006-10-14 at 04:23 +0800, Wei-Yee Chan wrote:

> > Too little internal cache makes the chip unable to handle large
> > amounts of RAM? That doesn't sound right to me. But I'm not a CS
> > major, so that actually might be the case. Can someone confirm 
> I cannot confirm that your problem is due to this, but there is a
> possibility that it could be.  Have U tried removing one of the strips?

I'm not convinced of this! The amount of cache you need surely depends
on the access patterns of data/code in main memory and should not be
dependent on the amount of physical memory.

As I understand caching, every time the processor tries to get a the
contents of a location in memory it checks to see if the contents of
that location has been cached. If not, it goes to main memory and puts a
copy in the cache, if yes, then it gets it from the cache which is much
faster than main memory. Hence frequently access locations stay in
cache. Also, loops of code that can all fit in cache will run much
faster than loops that do not fit.

Regards,
Tony.
-- 
Tony Arnold, IT Security Coordinator, University of Manchester,
IT Services Division, Kilburn Building, Oxford Road, Manchester M13 9PL.
T: +44 (0)161 275 6093, F: +44 (0)870 136 1004, M: +44 (0)773 330 0039
E: tony.arnold at manchester.ac.uk, H: http://www.man.ac.uk/Tony.Arnold




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