Interleaved memory

In computing, interleaved memory is a design made to compensate for the relatively slow speed of dynamic random-access memory (DRAM) or core memory, by spreading memory addresses evenly across memory banks. That way, contiguous memory reads and writes are using each memory bank in turn, resulting in higher memory throughputs due to reduced waiting for memory banks to become ready for desired operations. In computing, interleaved memory is a design made to compensate for the relatively slow speed of dynamic random-access memory (DRAM) or core memory, by spreading memory addresses evenly across memory banks. That way, contiguous memory reads and writes are using each memory bank in turn, resulting in higher memory throughputs due to reduced waiting for memory banks to become ready for desired operations. It is different from multi-channel memory architectures, primarily as interleaved memory is not adding more channels between the main memory and the memory controller. However, channel interleaving is also possible, for example in freescale i.MX6 processors, which allow interleaving to be done between two channels. With interleaved memory, memory addresses are allocated to each memory bank in turn. For example, in an interleaved system with two memory banks (assuming word-addressable memory), if logical address 32 belongs to bank 0, then logical address 33 would belong to bank 1, logical address 34 would belong to bank 0, and so on. An interleaved memory is said to be n-way interleaved when there are n banks and memory location i resides in bank i mod n.