You work for a small city IT department and you are going ov

You work for a small city IT department, and you are going over the inventory of RAM modules with a new employee. He notices that some of the RAM modules have chips only on one side while others have chips on both sides. How do you explain the difference to him?

A. All single-sided RAM chips are DRAM, or dynamic random access memory, while all double-sided chips are SRAM, or static random access memory.

B. All double-sided RAM chips have exactly twice the memory capacity as all their single-sided counterparts.

C. All single-sided RAM chips have one “rank” and the computer can access all their memory at once, while all double-sized chips have two “ranks” and the computer can access only one rank at a time.

D. All single-sided RAM chips have one “rank” and the computer can access all their memory at once, while all double-sized chips have two “ranks” and the computer can access all the memory in both ranks at the same time.

Solution

C. Ranks on memory modules share the same bus on the computer, so only one rank can be accessed by the computer at any given time. The other rank is deactivated while the first rank is accessed, and then the first rank is deactivated while the other rank is accessed.