Member Avatar for Fyrbeast

I am a college student, and am seeking an answer to a question. I am wondering if a modern day computer can function without RAM. If so, what is the outcome?

If anyone can help me, please respond with a way for me to get in touch with you, and give you proper citation in my paper.

Thanks in advance for anyone's assistance.

Fyrbeast

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Brief technical follow-up to : and are pointing in the right direction, but here is why that happens and what the practical exceptions are. A standard x86 desktop or laptop relies on external DRAM because the firmware and the CPU memory controller must run a DRAM init sequence and build the system memory map before the platform can provide a usable address space. CPU caches (L1/L2/L3) are small, hardware-managed buffers and are not a substitute for a large, addressable main memory region CPU cache.

On real motherboards the symptom is the firmware stopping early and signalling a memory fault with POST codes, beep patterns, or debug LEDs. Useful troubleshooting steps: reseat DIMMs, try a single known-good module in the recommended slot, clear CMOS, and consult the motherboard manual for POST/beep code meanings. For formal background on firmware memory initialization and platform behavior see the UEFI specification and Intel architecture documentation UEFI specification, Intel developer documentation.

Edge cases exist: many embedded boards and microcontrollers include internal flash and SRAM and can run with no external DRAM (examples include ARM Cortex-M/STM32 families), but those use a very different boot model than PC-class systems .

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Member Avatar for coolraj003

I dont think i hold the credibility to be cited in a academic paper but i can tell u for sure the computer would not function withuot proper RAM installed as RAM is one of the system critical components and without it computer would nt even boot up. Hope that clears up ur doubts a bit.

Raj

Member Avatar for jbennet

yes, but no

it will power on. it wont do anything useful though, just beep at you.

theoretically i suppose you could build a pc where it had no ram, only cache on the cpu , but im not sure.

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