Question

Suppose the RAM for a certain computer has 256M words, where each word is 16 bits long.What is the capacity of the memory expressed in bytes

Answer 1

Answer:

The RAM capacity expressed in bytes is

512 million bytes

Explanation:

a) Data and Calculations:

RAM contains 256m words

Each word = 16 bits

1 bit = 0.125 byte

This means that each word will have 2 (16 * 0.125) bytes

Therefore, the RAM contains 256m * 2 = 512 million bytes

b) A bit is 0.125 bytes and a byte is eight times bigger than a bit.  This implies that there are eight megabits in every megabyte, and one gigabyte is eight times bigger than one gigabit.  The 512 million bytes above are about 488.3 gigabytes, since 1 gigabyte equals 1,024 megabytes or 1,046,576 kilobytes.