Date: Mon, 22 Sep 2003 00:01:35 -0500 (CDT) From: Yale Patt To: ee360n-15280@sunfire2.ece.utexas.edu Subject: More from the student on the word "block" of memory Recall his last sentence was: On the other hand, the size of each "block" in the memory bank is the same as the addressibility of the processor, is that right? And I asked: Where did the word "block" come from? He wrote again: Dear Sir, You drew four "blocks" of memory in each data bank in the class. Each "block" was 1 byte wide. That's the "block" that I referred to in the previous email. Thanks! <> If I called each of those units "block," I was using the word too casually. Shame on me! We do have other more precise meanings for the word "block," like disk block and cache block. ...and we will get to both of those meanings within the next week or so. But in this case, if I said "block," I should have said something less specific, like "unit" or "thingee." And, yes, the four thingees that I showed on the blackboard on Wednesday was to highlight the addressability. That is, we had a 32 bit bus, and memory was byte-addressable, so I needed four of them to make up the width of the bus. If there are still questions about this, let's deal with it in class tomorrow before I move on to Virtual Memory. Yale Patt