Q2Computer Architecture
Question
Q.2. What is meant by an interleaved memory?
Answer
Interleaved memory divides memory into multiple independently-accessible banks so consecutive addresses lie in different banks, allowing overlapped/simultaneous access to increase effective memory bandwidth.
Interleaved memory is an organization in which main memory is divided into several independent modules or banks, with consecutive memory addresses distributed cyclically across these banks (e.g., address 0 in bank 0, address 1 in bank 1, address 2 in bank 2, and so on). This allows the memory controller to initiate an access to the next bank before the previous bank's access has completed, effectively overlapping multiple memory accesses in a pipelined fashion, which significantly increases effective memory bandwidth and reduces the average memory access time as seen by the CPU, particularly beneficial for sequential/block memory accesses common in instruction fetching and array processing.