eh plus - Address Bus Versus External Data Bus

dstyle347dstyle347 Boston
edited April 2006 in Hardware
What the hell, in A+ terms, is the difference between the address bus and the external data bus.. As far as I can discern from my reading they are and do the same thing.. What is their defining difference? I am very confused here so any help would be appreciated..

Comments

  • deicistdeicist Manchester, UK
    edited April 2006
    As far as I know (and I'm no expert) the address bus is used to actually address memory (assuming it's memory we're talking about) and the data bus is used to transport data. For example if my processor has an 8 bit address bus and a 16 bit data bus it can address (ie: use) 255 'sections' of memory (8 bits = 11111111 = 255) and it can transfer data at 16 bits per clock cycle. Now, those 'sections' can be any size, depending on how your processor deals with memory... but if you want larger memory sizes with a small address bus you have to have larger 'sections' which leads to lots of wasted memory because your processor can't address anything that doesn't start at the start of one of those sections. Make sense?
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