Info about Computer Memory
What is RAM computer memory and RAM future
The term RAM comes from “random access memory”. As most of us know already, the computer memory is formed by bytes. In the case of the “random access memory” or RAM memory, the memory can be accessed by random, so every byte can be accessed if needed without being need to access the other bytes that are preceding it. RAM computer memory can be found in each of our home computers, in form of a integrated circuit.
The RAM memory is the memory we are using every time we are running a program. This is the main memory used by your computer, and, as I said, is accessed every time you execute a program on your PC. If your computer has let’s say 4 megabytes of RAM memory, it actually means that approximately four millions of bytes can be used while performing its tasks. The RAM memory can be found in 2 types. The first of them and the one that is most common is DRAM (dynamic RAM). But this type is not so fast, because it needs to be refreshes frequently.
Also it responds to your commands much slower, because it has an access time of 60 nanoseconds. But this type of RAM is cheaper, so it is most common use. SRAM or the static RAM is the other type of the RAM memory, that is faster, and that if you will use it, it will respond to you in a better way, because it has an access time of 10 nanoseconds. The SRAM memory is faster because it doesn’t need the refreshing process, but it is not as commonly used because it can be quite expensive to buy. But both types of RAM memory are volatile, that means that once you have shut down your computer, all that was stored on them is gone.
In the present, the memory we buy to use for our computers is cheaper and cheaper, because the technology is progressing very much. But we need to learn how to create smaller chips, so we can provide a greater capacity for the RAM memory. So the future of RAM memory is STT-RAM, or “Spin Transfer Torque RAM”. In a few words, this new technology will be able to provide tiny spaces that can save much information, so it will able to have 64 megabytes of informations in a single chip. IBM already started to use this technology and produced the first prototype.