This post takes a look at the speed - latency and throughput - of various subsystems in a modern commodity PC, an Intel Core 2 Duo at 3.0GHz. I hope to give a feel for the relative speed of each component and a cheatsheet for back-of-the-envelope performance calculations. I’ve tried to show real-world throughputs (the sources are posted as a comment) rather than theoretical maximums. Time units are nanoseconds (ns, 10-9 seconds), milliseconds (ms, 10-3 seconds), and seconds (s). Throughput units are in megabytes and gigabytes per second. Let’s start with CPU and memory, the north of the northbridge:
External hard drives, flash drives and other similar forms of removable storage have made life pretty easy when it comes to moving data around. However, we live in a world where each person is likely to own multiple devices that external storage could (theoretically) be connected to.
Computer memory is used to store data and information in bits. Various types include RAM, ROM, secondary memory, etc. To learn in detail read this blog.
X. Yang, S. Blackburn, D. Frampton, J. Sartor, and K. McKinley. Proceedings of the 2011 ACM International Conference on Object Oriented Programming Systems Languages and Applications, page 307--324. ACM, (2011)