MEMORY LATENCY

4/3/99

Memory Latency: The time between requesting one or more data words from memory and receiving the first data back. Roughly equivalent to "Access Time", but includes any other delays such as precharge delays that might be omitted from access time specifications. The term "memory latency" has largely replaced "access time" since the access time for data after the first in burst mode transfers can be substantially less than that for the first data. Memory Latency is very important since modern fast CPUs spend much of their time waiting for data to be transferred from memory.