August
1997 QUESTION 3 Total Marks: 20 Marks |
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| 3. | An important feature in designing a system is the construction of its memory hierarchy. | ||
| (a) Describe the relationship between access time, cost per bit and capacity which holds across the spectrum of memory technologies. | [4] | ||
| (b) Memory can be classified into internal and external memory. Give three types of external memory. | [3] | ||
| (c) Cache memory is used between the CPU registers and the main memory. What is its purpose? What phenomenon of memory access does it depend on? Explain what is meant by this. | [4] | ||
| (d) When a new block is brought into the cache, one of the existing blocks must be replaced. Briefly describe three replacement algorithms which may be used to choose the block to be replaced. | [6] | ||
| (e) What is the purpose of virtual memory? | [3] | ||