Difference between memory bus and address bus

Question

Can someone very briefly point out the differences between the memory bus and address bus in computer architectures ? Also when you say memory bus does it imply that you are referring to the databus ?

Answer 1

Beautifully explained here.

In isolation, the microprocessor, the memory and the input/output ports are interesting components, but they cannot do anything useful. In combination, they can form a complete system if they can communicate with each other. This communication is accomplished over bundles of signal wires (known as buses) that connect the parts of the system together.

There are normally three types of bus in any processor system:

• An address bus: this determines the location in memory that the processor will read data from or write data to.
• A data bus: this contains the contents that have been read from the memory location or are to be written into the memory location.
• A control bus: this manages the information flow between components indicating whether the operation is a read or a write and ensuring that the operation happens at the right time.

Answer 2

Data bus:

The data bus is an electrical path that connects the cpu,memory and the other hardware devices on the motherboard. the number of wires in the data bus affects the speed at which data can travel between components.Since each wire can transfer one bit at a time therefore,an 8-wire or one byte at a time.

Address bus:

The reason that the address bus is important is that the number of lines in it tells the maximum number of memory addresses.8 bit data is enough to represent 2(8 in power)=256.

Answer 3

Memory bus consists of an address bus (used to specify memory address) and data bus (used to specify value to be written to it).

Answer 4

When you read data from memory or write data to memory you operate with 2 different items, the address and the data. Somehow they have to be transferred between the CPU and memory. You can have two buses to transfer them independently. Or you can have just one and use it for both, one thing at a time.

Address and data buses may have different widths, that is, they may carry different number of bits.

Yes, memory bus usually means data bus (that carries the memory data).