How Direct Memory Access Works Direct memory access (DMA) is a means of having a peripheral device control a processor’s memory bus directly. DMA permits the peripheral, such as a UART, to transfer ...

DMA (Direct Memory Access) frees the CPU from these menial tasks. With DMA, peripheral devices do not have to ask the CPU to fetch some data for them, but can do it themselves.

With modern RAM, the system can, in principle, access any data memory without having to follow a predetermined sequence. A more appropriate translation here would be direct memory access.

Direct Memory Access (DMA) was introduced later. However, RAM access can still be slow because of the motherboard sizes and distances.