A company needs to design a memory system for its newly developed CPU chip, whic

Question

A company needs to design a memory system for its newly developed CPU chip, which uses 3-bit address mechanism. The required memory size is 128 bits.

a) Please help design this memory system, indicating the cell size and number of cells. Simply justify your design.

b)If the designers upgrade this CPU so that now it uses 4-bit address mechanism, but decide to use 8-bit as the memory cell size, what’s the addressable space for this computer? If the current memory has 64 bits, how many more bytes can you add to this computer?

Explanation / Answer

a) there are only 3 bits to address mechanism so only 23 = 8 locations can be addressed in other words only 8 cells can be addressed with address 0 - 000

1 - 001 , 2 -010 , .....7-111 .So the cell size = 8 bits = 1 byte

no. of cells = 128/8 = 16 cells

b)4 bit address mechanism can address 16 locations ranging from 0 to 15

as cell size is 8 bits so the number of cells will be = 128/8 = 16 cells

current memory = 64 bits = 8 bytes

4 bits can address 16 loactions or cell

each cell has 8 bits or 1 byte so it can address 16 bytes

so it can offer 16-8 = 8 bytes or 64 bits more to the computer

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