What is memory?

You may have heard of memory, but you may not be sure what it is or what its uses are. It is not as conspicuous as a computer host, nor as intuitive as a screen, but it quietly affects our computer experience. To understand memory, one can start with its location in the computer, appearance structure, specifications, capacity frequency, and virtual memory.

Memory, also known as internal storage, is used to temporarily store computational data and exchange data between the CPU and external storage devices such as hard drives. It is a bridge for communication between the outside world and the CPU. For example, compare ourselves to CPUs, hard drives to libraries, and memory to bookshelves at home. When we write our papers, we go to the library to search for information because the required materials are often random and discontinuous, and the distance from home to the library is long and inconvenient. Therefore, we borrow some books and materials that may be needed and put them in the bookshelf for easy reference at any time during a period of time. As soon as the computer starts running, the operating system will transfer the data that needs to be computed from memory to the CPU for processing. After the computation is completed, the CPU will then transmit the results. Therefore, memory performance has a significant impact on computers.

From the appearance, memory is usually composed of a green circuit board, which is the PCB. The black chips attached to the circuit board are memory chips, also known as memory chips. The golden part at the bottom row is called the golden finger, which is used to insert into the memory slot of the motherboard. There are capacitors soldered on the memory PCB, and if the capacitors fall off, the memory cannot function properly. It should be noted that the gold fingers of DDR4 memory have a certain curvature on both sides, and are not straight gold fingers. This is a unique design of DDR4 memory and not a quality issue. The gap in the middle of the golden finger is called the anti misoperation port, also known as the anti mistake port, which is used to prevent different generations of memory from being mistakenly inserted into incompatible motherboards. In addition, not one memory granule represents 1GB of memory capacity. There are differences between different models of memory, and the memory capacity should be determined based on the manufacturer's identification. For example, with a capacity of 8GB, DDR5 memory may only have 4 memory chips, while DDR4 may have 8 memory chips, but DDR5 performs better in terms of performance.

Since its inception, memory has undergone several generations of updates, including SDRAM, DDR, DDR2, DDR3, DDR3L, DDR4, and the latest DDR5. Although there are many types of memory, they are actually easy to recognize. The anti misoperation socket positions of different memories are different, so they cannot be mixed. If it is different types of memory, they cannot be used on the same motherboard, and do not "force miracles". For the issue of mixing that users are concerned about, memory modules of the same specifications and frequency but different brands can be mixed. The same specifications but different frequencies, such as DDR4 2933 and DDR4 3200, can generally be used interchangeably, but the actual operating frequency of the memory will be aligned downwards. Different specifications, such as DDR4 and DDR5, cannot be mixed.

Capacity refers to the storage space size of a memory module, consistent with the concept of hard disk capacity. The larger the capacity, the more data can be pre read or temporarily stored. When the memory capacity is full, the system will wait for the hard disk to save some data to free up memory space for storing new temporary data, causing system lag. At present, 16GB is the mainstream in the market, whether it is for daily office work, such as opening WeChat Excel、 Multiple web pages, watching TV shows, playing regular games, or simply editing images or cutting 1080P short videos can all be easily handled with 16GB. Frequently cutting 4K videos, doing 3D modeling, local AI training, etc., you can choose 32GB or more of memory.

In terms of frequency, generally speaking, the higher the frequency, the faster the running speed, which means faster read and write speeds for memory modules.

Virtual memory is a technology for memory management in computer systems. It makes the application think it has continuously available memory, which is a continuous and complete address space, but in reality, it is usually divided into multiple physical memory fragments, with some temporarily stored on external disk storage for data exchange when needed. Simply put, computer systems will partition a portion of the hard disk into virtual memory for use. In the early stages of computer development, memory capacity was often small, so a certain amount of virtual memory effectively increased the possibility of opening more programs on the computer. On the other hand, due to the much slower read and write speeds of disks compared to memory, sometimes the speed of opening applications on a computer may slow down. The suggestion for virtual memory is to set it small enough if the physical memory is large enough.