Ullrich Drepper Writes about Memory
Ullrich Drepper Writes about "Memory"
2007-10-10T20:33:00
The title of this paper is an homage to David Goldberg's classic paper “What Every Computer Scientist Should Know About Floating-Point Arithmetic” [goldberg]. Goldberg's paper is still not widely known, although it should be a prerequisite for anybody daring to touch a keyboard for serious programming. Read What every programmer should know about memory - part 1 and part 2 Read the comments too, they are interesting. You may wonder whether you need to understand stuff like how a DRAM cell is implemented using a capacitor and a transistor or how a SRAM cell is implemented using six transistors. Here is what one reader says: There are programmers out there, who write memory controller configuration code for boot loaders. I have done it and knowing the electrical design of memory cells really helped to answer simple questions like why the hell does DRAM need a configurable controller while the onchip SRAM is nicely ready for use right after powerup. Another reader suggests: Personally, I think it is useful to have a reasonable knowledge one level of abstraction down, and one level of abstraction up. There are a number of reasons for this:
- You can often find optimizations that cross abstraction barriers. It is difficult to predict what you'll need to know to do this, so you really need to have a deep understanding of both layers. In some cases, you can also influence the hardware design.
- You can predict how the technology may evolve.
- You gain intellectual depth.