In the most simple computer system architecture, all control lies with the CPU (Central Processing Unit). This means not only the execution of commands that affect the CPU’s internal register or cache ...

Direct memory access (DMA) is a means of having a peripheral device control a processor’s memory bus directly. DMA permits the peripheral, such as a UART, to transfer data directly to or from memory ...

In the eighties, computer processors became faster and faster, while memory access times stagnated and hindered additional performance increases. Something had to be done to speed up memory access and ...

Last time, in Part 1, we introduced somebasics behind Direct Memory Access (DMA) -why it's needed, and how it's structured and controlled. This time,we'll focus on the classifications of DMA transfers ...

Intel announced an internal CPU interconnect called Compute Express Link Interconnect, or CXL in March of 2019. CXL is a PCIe Gen5-based standard that handles the problems of cache coherency and ...

AMD wants to talk about HSA, Heterogeneous Systems Architecture (HSA), its vision for the future of system architectures. To that end, it held a press conference last week to discuss what it’s calling ...

Emerging network technologies such as 10G Ethernet and InfiniBand make it possible to link servers at high speeds, but for servers to fully benefit, network interfaces need to be replaced with a more ...

Transferring large blocks of data within memory as well as to and from peripherals. Direct memory access (DMA) avoids loading the CPU's register with small amounts of data from memory and storing them ...