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On 31/08/2015 10:50, Peter Humphrey wrote: |
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> On Sunday 30 August 2015 18:26:49 Mick wrote: |
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> |
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>> Modern appliances with Green stickers on them (whatever they're called) are |
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>> more efficient by design. To some extent this is also true with PCs. I |
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>> still have an old Pentium 4 32bit running a couple of test environments and |
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>> back up storage. I can assure you that the room gets hot after it has been |
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>> running for a couple of hours! :-) |
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> |
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> The desktop machine I'm referring to (an Amari "workstation") dates from 2009. |
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> It has an i5 processor, 16GB RAM* and two 2GB SSDs as the main power sinks. It |
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> sits (runs) in a boxroom 6ft square and keeps it comfortably warm. I haven't |
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> noticed any change in ambient temp since the SSDs replaced spinners. |
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> |
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> * Whoever named that Random Access had a strange understanding of English. The |
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> last thing I want from memory is random access! How much better it would have |
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> been to call it something like Direct Access. Oh well - much too late now. |
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> |
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It's random access to distinguish it from serial access. In the early |
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early days there were a lot of strange methods being tried to build |
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memory - like dots on a cathode ray tube! To get to bit you wanted, you |
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had to wait till the scanning beam reached that part of the screen - |
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serial access. Addressable memory on a grid pattern came much later. |
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Random Access really means "able to access any random address as fast as |
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any other random address". |
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RAM is also not the opposite of ROM :-) |
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-- |
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Alan McKinnon |
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alan.mckinnon@×××××.com |
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