RAM memory features: What is RAM and how it works
The abbreviation RAM means Random Access Memory, random access memory: it would be better to say direct access, in the sense that the processor immediately accesses the data and programs it must use. RAM together with ROM memory is part of the computer’s main memory.
In other words, the RAM memory is also called the working memory since the data and the programs cannot be used by the processor if they are not inside the RAM, from which they are extracted for the necessary processing. Thus, the RAM contains any data and program that the computer is processing.
From this we understand why increasing the PC’s RAM memory can lead to an increase in performance: there is more space to load all the programs and data that must be processed, reducing access to the secondary memory.
The contents of the RAM can be written, modified and deleted: when the computer is turned on, however, the RAM memory is completely empty and returns to this state once the computer is turned off. For this reason, RAM is also called volatile memory.
The RAM consists of a large number of elementary circuits, the capacitors, which can take only two states: load and unload, off and on. These two states correspond to the symbols zero and one through which we represent any type of information.
Currently the access times to the central memory are in the order of tens of nanoseconds (1 ns = 1 billionth of a second).
Finally, today’s personal computers (year 2018) have a RAM memory ranging from 4Gb to 32Gb / 64Gb.