The address bus is a unidirectional communication pathway that a central processing unit uses to dictate which memory location or peripheral device it wants to read from or write to. The width of the address bus determines the maximum amount of memory the processor can directly access; for example, a 32-bit address bus can address exactly 4 gigabytes of memory space.
Probe the address bus while the CPU boots to see if it gets stuck trying to read the first instruction from the ROM.
Related terms
Control bus
A set of physical connections used by a central processing unit to communicate control signals to other hardware.
System bus
A shared communication pathway that links the CPU, memory, and peripherals in a computer.
Central processing unit
The primary silicon processor responsible for fetching, decoding, and executing instructions in a computer system.