We still haven’t figured out how the microprocessor can keep track of all that memory capacity that put your wallet in some difficulty. To answer that, we need to talk about some of the components of a microprocessor. It’s time to zoom in inside the CPU and start looking for those legendary monsters with dark powers. The first part mentioned the program counter as an important part of the CPU. This program counter is actually a sort of register. The CPU incorporates a series of hardware registers that resemble sticky notes used at reminding people of something. The CPU owes these registers a lot, because they can be easily and quickly referenced by many of the instructions the computer executes.
I’m going to get a little technical now, but it really helps you understand the complexity of a CPU. Several of these registers are dedicated to keeping track of memory addresses and are named accordingly. The program counter indicates the next instruction and the index register is used to automatically step through tables of data. The stack register keeps track of memory addresses to return from program subroutines.
I will only quickly mention the segmented and unsegmented types of memory architecture. The prevailing one is the segmented one because it was promoted by Intel and it still exists in CPUs nowadays. This type of memory architecture allows for a better and faster management of data chunks that have to be processed by the CPU.
A few words about memory protection, too. Intel’s segmented architecture made it impossible for a program to delve into the memory space allotted to another application. If it tries to infiltrate, a memory fault message is generated by the operating system environment and the invading program is forced to crash. You can usually recover from this situation without having to reboot and you know exactly which program was responsible for the mess as the OS clearly indicates it.
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