To understand how memory is organized, we need to examine the access paradigm.
Recall from Figure 10.3 that a memory controller provides the interface between a physical
memory and a processor that uses the memory†. Several questions arise. What is
the structure of the connection between a processor and memory? What values pass
across the connection? How does the processor view the memory system?
To achieve high performance, memory systems use parallelism: the connection
between the processor and controller consists of many wires that are used simultaneously.
Each wire can transfer one data bit at any time. Figure 10.5 illustrates the concept.