Latency

  • Thread starter Thread starter Travis King
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"Travis King" said:
What does the term 'latency' mean?
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Means the same as "delay". The time from when the processor
needs the data, until the first data comes back, of the burst
of data from the RAM.

Paul
 
Travis King said:
What does the term 'latency' mean?
Click to expand...
Effectively 'wait' or 'delay'.
On a hard disk (for instance), the 'latency' to fetch a prticular block of
data, will be the combination of the time taken to get the head to the right
track, and then wait for the disk to spin round till the sector arrives. So
faster spinning disks have lower 'rotational latency', while ones that step
faster reduce the 'seek latency'. On memory, there are again different
figures, covering the wait from different parts of the addressing (hence
'CAS latency', is the delay from the final part of the address - the 'column
address', till data is valid.

Best Wishes
 
What does the term 'latency' mean?
Click to expand...

Latency refers to the delay between start of an operation (such as a
read or write) and it's completion. We might just call this "speed",
but in synchronous DRAM's, access is pipelined. The memory controller
need not wait for the prior operation to complete before issuing another.
Thus latency does not directly imply memory throughput.
 
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