Review of Essential Terms and Concepts

1. Which is faster, SRAM or DRAM?

2. What are the advantages of using DRAM for main memory?

3. Name three different applications where ROMs are often used.

4. Explain the concept of a memory hierarchy. Why did your authors choose to represent it as a pyramid?

5. Explain the concept of locality of reference and state its importance to memory systems.

6. What are the three forms of locality?

7. Give two noncomputer examples of the concept of cache.

8. Which of L1 or L2 cache is faster? Which is smaller? Why is it smaller?

9. Cache is accessed by its ________, whereas main memory is accessed by its _______.

10. What are the three fields in a direct mapped cache address? How are they used to access a word located in cache?

11. How does associative memory differ from regular memory? Which is more expensive and why?

12. Explain how fully associative cache is different from direct mapped cache.

13. Explain how set associative cache combines the ideas of direct and fully associative cache.

14. Direct mapped cache is a special case of set associative cache where the set size is 1. So fully associative cache is a special case of set associative cache where the set size is ___.

15. What are the three fields in a set associative cache address and how are they used to access a location in cache?

16. Explain the four cache replacement policies presented in this chapter.

17. Why is the optimal cache replacement policy important?

18. What is the worst-case cache behavior that can develop using LRU and FIFO cache replacement policies?

19. What, exactly, is effective access time (EAT)?

20. Explain how to derive an effective access time formula.

21. When does caching behave badly?

22. What is a dirty block?

23. Describe the advantages and disadvantages of the two cache write policies.

24. What is the difference between a virtual memory address and a physical memory address? Which is larger? Why?

25. What is the objective of paging?

26. Discuss the pros and cons of paging.

27. What is a page fault?

28. What causes internal fragmentation?

29. What are the components (fields) of a virtual address?

30. What is a TLB and how does it improve EAT?

31. What are the advantages and disadvantages of virtual memory?

32. When would a system ever need to page its page table?

33. What causes external fragmentation and how can it be fixed?