So as far as I understand Random Access Memory lets us access any stored in it data regardless where it’s stored and with the same speed.
I just don’t understand what makes that physically possible. Data is being transfered through electrons at approximately the speed of light through the wires. But how do you connect the wires to access all of the data everywhere in RAM at the same time?
Is the data being broken down into bits over all the RAM units – making the data collection process longer as you have to gather all the data particles or is there something I’m missing.
If I got any of my facts wrong feel free to correct me.
In: 7
It doesn’t let you access everything at once. It lets you access anything in any order. So the computer can reference a given memory address without having to go through other addresses first.
The naming convention is very old. You ever watch an old movie with the giant computer servers that had the reels of magnetic tape spinning on the front? It comes from that era. Memory was accessed in sequence. If you wanted to move to a memory address the system had to move through all addresses between the current location and the location it wanted to get to (winding the magnetic tape while monitoring its position to reach the correct location).
The wire connections in ram are always present, but transistors act as switches to control whether an electric signal can travel down that line or not. The memory address corresponds to a physical location in the memory chip and the connections its attached to. By default the data lines to all memory addresses are off. When the computer wants to read an address it turns the lines for that location on, reads the data, and then turns them back off. It doesn’t need to cycle through all the memory addresses between the previous data call and the current data call though. The actual process is more complicated and happens extremely fast, but that’s the general gist of how its working.
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