Memory

Register and Memory---

Registers are storage locations internal the the processor. CPU
instructions operate on these values directly. On RISC processors, all data
must be moved into a register before it can be operated. On CISC (Intel)
chips, there are a few operations that can load data from RAM, process it,
and save the result back out, but the fastest operations work directly with
registers.

Also, there are registers that are set aside for certain tasks, these
generally include a program counter, stack, and flags.

Each register also has a size that determines the maximum amount of data
that can be processed at a time. The registers on Pentium chips, for
example, are 32 bits.

Finally, there are generally only a few registers available on a processer.
Intel chips, for example, have 6 general purpose registers, and several
specialized registers including a base register, stack register, flags
register, program counter, and some addressing registers.

Memory, or RAM, is located external to the CPU. Generally speaking, data
has to be loaded into a CPU register from memory before the CPU can process
it,
RAM is much slower than registers, there is a lot more RAM than registers,
and generally memory can be addressed on a byte boundaries, where registers
may not be able to access all the bytes in a register.

To summarize: in general, registers are temporary storage in the CPU that
holds the data the processor is currently working on, while RAM holds the
program instructions and the data the program requires.