banks? [LWN.net]

banks?

Posted Sep 24, 2007 16:54 UTC (Mon) by sbishop (subscriber, #33061)
In reply to: banks? by vapier
Parent article: What every programmer should know about memory, Part 1

Now you've got the Gentoo crowd double checking their linker man page... :)

Seriously, I've heard that the translation from a physical address to a particular bank/row/column combination is specific to the memory controller. Which makes perfect sense.

Also, let me make this clear: my bank comment was in regards to the "more details than you really need to know" section anyway. With Linux and/or random, commodity hardware, you can't call out a specific row or column either. But if you're going to talk about rows and columns, you ought to at least mention banks, the third address component of a modern DRAM. ("Modern DRAM" here means, approximately, anything I'm familiar with: Sync-DRAM, DDR, DDR2, etc.)

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banks?

Posted Sep 24, 2007 20:18 UTC (Mon) by vapier (subscriber, #15768) [Link]

i might point out that linker scripts arent documented in the linker man page

i obviously cant read minds, but i think the discussion of being able to scan rows without re-issuing a CAS command will lead into the idea of accessing data in a certain fashion (in sequential lines) rather than much more randomly ... whereas with banks, exhibiting certain behavior at runtime wont matter since in general, being in different banks is random