A question about memory and the system speed

[ITstudent]

I got a little question here that says:

"One often thinks the processor speed determines the speed of whole system. Explain how memory size (and usage) can have impact on total speed of the system?"

Can anyone help me answering it please...


Cheers..

 

[cedance]

i would like to answer at the top level of abstraction.. i mean a very general one not goin deeper into it.. and hope that would very well clear... its obvious i think.

what ever ur processor speed may be, its ultimately processing the "data" which is residing on a hardisk(secondary "memory") or primary memory or cache.

a processor speed is high means that the instructions are executed at less time. suppose it asks for a fetch instruction.. then its ultimately a memory read operation.. which is to be completed before another instruction can be issued,... if at all there is any dependancy between the first and the second. so its obvious that there is a dependancy on the memory. and u would know primary memories are faster than hardisks and cache are faster than primary memory ( cache -> static) ... which impleis they are costlier, cache being highest.. so we compromise for both cost and speed.. having cache the smalest size and hardisk as big as that!

hope this helped.. and i got ur question right.

/cedance

 

[arunragavan]

well its the combo of memory and speed is always better.. ppl always mistake speed with performance, its also the memory which is important.. When ever a new processor is introduced in the market its also the number of instructions that the processor can process, new type of instruction sets it can process.. somethin like that,

increase ur physical RAM.. this wud always help in improving the performance of ur machine..

speed match with the processor is also important, like take for example

p4 - 2.4ghz supports upto 333mhz fsb of ddr sdram (motherboard dependent also)

so all factors like RAM,PROCESSOR and MOTHERBOARD configuration.. all shud match to give u the best performance.

with regards,

 

[soccer]

i think the speed of processor have no essiential relation to memory size. the key of this question is just the performance of processor in system is having important relation to bus architecture linking memory.

 

[jackson_peng]

keep in minds. it is the "bottle-neck" define the system speed, rather than the processor speed.

 

[kshitij_s81]

The speed of the system is governed by the following factors
1 processor speed
2 RAM
3 system memory

So its not only processor speed or RAM or system memory which alone determines the speed of the process because during the process all the factors like memory management, time management and process management comes into existence
Bye
Kshitij Sukhwal