Intelligent access to mass memories

The availability of efficient VLSI components allows the designer to unburden the CPU of today´s computer systems from primitive administration and the I/O channels from redundant data transfers by installing additional hardware in peripheral devices. Adding the logic to mass memories results in an intelligent access; it accelerates data processing by concurrent processing and the reduction of mass memory access. Specialized and function-oriented designs improve the efficiency of the system. An overview of various possibilities and implemented designs supporting the access of mass memories by appropriate hardware is given. It is found that, in addition to memory and data management services, the real addressing of data is one of the most interesting points which (in nonnumeric data processing especially) is content-related