 | This article includes a list of references, related reading, or external links, but its sources remain unclear because it lacks inline citations. (September 2020) |
Memory bound refers to a situation in which the time to complete a given computational problem is decided primarily by the amount of free memory required to hold the working data. This is in contrast to algorithms that are compute-bound, where the number of elementary computation steps is the deciding factor.
Memory and computation boundaries can sometimes be traded against each other, e.g. by saving and reusing preliminary results or using lookup tables.