Open Source Firmware Conference 2018

Why memory is a hard problem in modern computer architectures
2018-09-12 , Main

Back at the beginning of home computers, volatile memory was a rather easy problem to solve in the computer architecture, but with the computers getting faster and multiple cores, it has become a surprisingly tricky problem for processor and chipset designers to solve.

This talk tries to shed some light on the difficulties of implementing high-performance memory subsystems and how solutions to those difficulties affect the design of RAM, memory controllers, cache subsystems and even the microarchitecture of the processor cores.

See also: Slides (120.5 KB)

Felix has studied electrical engineering and currently works as a freelancer in the area of hardware, FPGA, firmware and software engineering. He is interested in finding out how software and hardware works and how they can be improved.