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Main Memory: DRAM

This video presents the same text shown beside it, spoken and on screen. It adds nothing the text does not say.

State

Dynamic RAM builds main memory from capacitors — charge held means 1, absent means 0 — larger and cheaper than cache, volatile, and leaky enough to need continual refresh.

Show

A machine advertising thirty-two gigabytes is claiming roughly thirty-two billion capacitor-backed bytes.

Watch for

The charge fades; the hardware re-pours it constantly.