On Wed, 24 Oct 2007 11:29:29 -0700, Peter Alfke <[email protected]>
wrote:

>Jonathan, why so aggressive?

Ooh, I can be much more aggressive than that! And it
certainly wasn't directed at you.

>I was just pointing out that certain applications naturally perform
>sufficient refresh operations in their normal addressing sequence. I
>can't see why this is "completely ridiculuous"...

Nor is it; the absurdity comes from bending the addressing
so that only a small part of each row is sequentially accessed,
thereby wasting the massive increase in memory bandwidth that
can be achieved for sequential-access applications by using
the row buffer as a cache. My spleen was being vented at some
designers of old computers (as alluded to by Antti, not you)
who used video scan to access every row of DRAM on each video
field, thereby unnecessarily burning-up memory bandwidth
(which was in short enough supply on such machines) in order
to save the trouble of doing refresh properly...
--
Jonathan Bromley, Consultant

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