a system and method for calculating memory addresses in a partitioned memory in a processing system having a processing unit , input and output units , a program sequencer and an external interface . an address calculator includes a set of storage elements , such as registers , and an arithmetic unit for calculating a memory address of a vector element dependent upon values stored in the storage elements and the address of a previous vector element . the storage elements hold stride , skip and span values and optionally a type value , relating to the spacing between elements in the same partition , the spacing between elements in the consecutive partitions , the number of elements in a partition and the size of a vector element , respectively .