Difference Between Memory and Register

Memory vs Register

Summary: Difference Between Memory and Register is that Memory consists of electronic components that store instructions waiting to be executed by the processor, data needed by those instructions, and the results of processing the data information. While Registers are also a part of a computer processor and holding one small piece of data in Processor. A register may hold a piece of data, like a storage address and computer instruction.

Memory

Memory consists of electronic components that store instructions waiting to be executed by the processor, data needed by those instructions, and the results of processing the data (information). Memory usually consists of one or more chips on the motherboard or some other circuit board in the computer. Memory stores three basic categories of items:

the operating system and other system software that control or maintain the computer and its devices;
application programs that carry out a specific task such as word processing;
the data being processed by the application programs and resulting information. This role of memory to store both data and programs is known as the stored program concept.

Register

Registers are also a part of a computer processor and holding one small piece of data in Processor. A register may hold a piece of data, like a storage address and computer instruction. Some instructions specify registers as part of the instruction. E.g it may be specified that an instruction of two registers can be placed together on a specified register.

There must be a large register enough so that it can hold instructions. For example, in a 32-Bit instruction computer, a register must be 32 bits in length. But in many computers, there are smaller registers like half registers for shorter instructions. Registers may have arbitrary or numbers names which depends on the processor designs and language rules.

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