A memory operand is one that refers to the value of a memory location. Of the three types, memory operands are the slowest. However, a memory operand can specify any one of the 232 memory locations, which makes it very flexible.
Memory operands can serve as source and/or destination operands in an instruction.
The 386 instruction set offers many different ways to compute the address of the memory location to access. We will explore these later in this module. A RISC (reduced instruction set computer) typically offers far fewer ways to specify the address of memory location.