Tyan Computer Tyan S1598 user manual Appendix

Appendix 1

Glossary

Latency is the amount of time that one part of a system spends waiting for another part to catch up. This is most common when the system sends data out to a peripheral device, and is waiting for the peripheral to send some data back (peripherals tend to be slower than onboard system components).

NVRAM ROM and EEPROM are both examples of Non-Volatile RAM, memory that holds its data without power. DRAM, in contrast, is volatile.

OEMs (Original Equipment Manufacturers) like Compaq or IBM package other companies’ motherboards and hardware inside their case and sell them.

The parallel port transmits the bits of a byte on eight different wires at the same time (that is, in parallel form, eight bits at the same time).

PCI stands for Peripheral Component Interconnect. PCI is a 32-bit local bus (data pathway) which is faster than the ISA bus. Local buses are those which operate within a single system (as opposed to a network bus, which connects multiple systems).

The PCI PIO (PCI Programmable Input/Output) modes are the data transfer modes used by IDE drives. These modes use the CPU for data transfer (DMA channels do not). PCI refers to the type of bus used by these modes to communicate with the CPU.

PCI-to-PCI bridge allows you to connect multiple PCI devices onto one PCI slot.

Pipeline burst SRAM is a fast secondary cache. It is used as a secondary cache because SRAM is slower than SDRAM, but usually larger. Data is cached first to the faster primary cache, and then, when the primary cache is full, to the slower secondary cache.

Pipelining improves system performance by allowing the CPU to begin executing a second instruction before the first is completed. A pipeline can be likened to an assembly line, with a given part of the pipeline repeatedly executing a set part of an operation on a series of instructions.

PM timers (Power Management timers) are software timers that count down the number of seconds or minutes until the system times out and enters sleep, suspend, or doze mode.

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