RAM Basics 101

This section is meant to be a brief tutorial about RAM basics, so for those of you who are pretty comfortable with the workings of RAM, go right ahead and skip this. Otherwise, for those of you who would like to learn a little more about the way RAM operates, this is for you! I'm gonna try to keep it lively and move things along, but when it comes down to it, we are talking about RAM, so let's try to stay frosty.

RAM stands for "Random Access Memory". The reason RAM is random access is because older memory types were accessed in a linear fashion. To illustrate, imagine a single-file row of data. In linear accessing, when the CPU wanted to find a certain bit of data, it would go down this row, starting from the beginning, and check each spot to see if the data was there or not. The system had to read through the entire file, even if it knew where the data was.

This is, if you can imagine, inefficient. The computer had to check this line of data each time it needed a memory access. Random accessing reorganizes this single-file row of data into more of a grid, like graph paper, where you have columns AND rows. When the computer needs to access the memory now, it can check any spot by using a row address and a column address. This sped things up quite a bit!

Definitions of "Memory"

Also, keep in mind when we speak of RAM, we are talking here about system memory. The term "memory" itself has a lot of connotations within a computer, like memory on a hard drive, and such. Typically, though, when we speak of "memory", we are talking about either cache or system memory, usually denoted in some number of megabytes (MB) for home computers or sometimes gigabytes (GB) for servers.

The function that memory has in a computer is to speed up operations. This is done by the computer by storing frequently accessed data in the memory, so when the computer looks for certain data, it will check in the fastest memory first, and work its way down. Keep in mind, though, that there are different kinds of memory within the computer.