stf92 |
11-15-2012 03:20 PM |
Of course more RAM is the only thing better than RAM. If a processor has a physical address space of 2^40 bytes, implementing the whole space (to put 2^40 bytes of RAM on the other side of the bus)is the optimal solution, disregarding money and the physical space to place that much RAM. But the 80286 designers took a lot of work to design the mechanism of virtual addressing. The 80286 (famous AT IBM PC) had a _physical_ address space of 2^24 bytes (16MB). This means the processor effectively had 24 address lines. Now, in those days, RAM _was_ expensive, and nobody would dream of installing the full 16MB in a desktop machine. But there was virtual addressing, which meant full CPU support for memory management and a mechanism whereby the program got the illusion of having a large memory space, larger than the physical one.
So the full concept of the CPU Protected Virtual Address Mode rests upon the usage of large amounts of external memory or swap memory and it seems a bit of an absurdity to end up in a scenario where swap is no longer needed.
|