The parallel connections of a memory bus are important to both programmers and
computer architects. From an architectural standpoint, the parallel connections improve
performance. From a programming point of view, the parallel connections define a
memory transfer size (i.e., the amount of data that can be read or written to memory in
a single operation).
In the next section, we will see that transfer size is a crucial aspect of memory organization.
A later section considers how transfer size affects programming.