Memory bandwidth is the rate at which data can be read from or stored into a semiconductor memory by a processor. Memory bandwidth is usually expressed in units of bytes/second, though this can vary for systems with natural data sizes that are not a multiple of the commonly used 8-bit bytes. Memory bandwidth that is advertised for a given memory or system is usually the maximum theoretical bandwidth. In practice the observed memory bandwidth will be less than (and is guaranteed not to exceed) the advertised bandwidth. A variety of computer benchmarks exist to measure sustained memory bandwidth using a variety of access patterns. These are intended to provide insight into the memory bandwidth that a system should sustain on various classes of real applications. Measurement conventions There are three different conventions for defining the quantity of data transferred in the numerator of "bytes/second": The bcopy convention: counts the amount of data copied from one location in memory to another location per unit time. For example, copying 1 million bytes from one location in memory to another location in memory in one second would be counted as 1 million bytes per second. The bcopy convention is self-consistent, but is not easily extended to cover cases with more complex access patterns, for example three reads and one write. The Stream convention: sums the amount of data that the application code explicitly reads plus the amount of data that the application code explicitly writes. Using the previous 1 million byte copy example, the STREAM bandwidth would be counted as 1 million bytes read plus 1 million bytes written in one second, for a total of 2 million bytes per second. The STREAM convention is most directly tied to the user code, but may not count all the data traffic that the hardware is actually required to perform. The hardware convention: counts the actual amount of data read or written by the hardware, whether the data motion was explicitly requested by the user code or not. Using the same 1 million byte copy example, the hardware bandwidth on computer systems with a write allocate cache policy would include an additional 1 million bytes of traffic because the hardware reads the target array from memory into cache before performing the stores. This gives a total of 3 million bytes per second actually transferred by the hardware. The hardware convention is most directly tied to