Managing the Memory

Definition: Memory Management

Memory management is controlled by the Operating System. The Operating Systems controls where programs and data are placed in the main memory of the computer.

Data and Storage in Memory

The presentation above explained how computer Memory is divided up into a number of storage locations. Each storage location stores items of data which can be identified by its unique address.

The amount of data that can be held in each storage location is called a Word.

A Word is the number of bits (0's and 1's) that can be processed in a single operation. A 4 bit Word, known as a nibble, means that only 4 bits can be stored in each memory location.

One way of increasing the speed of computers is to increase the size of the Word or the number of bits that can be stored in each memory location. So for example, an 8 bit word ( i.e a byte ) doubles the speed of processing of computers with a 4 bit word, because twice the number of bits can be processed in a single operation.

Recently computers have been able to process data with a word length of 32 bits (4 bytes) and 64 bits, (8 bytes) and now 128 bit computers (16 bytes) are common.

What you should be able to do!

1. Explain that memory is managed by the operating system.

2. Describe how each piece of data has its own unique address in the memory.