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Appendix 1
Glossary
ISA stands for Industry Standard Architecture. ISA is a slower 8- or 16-bit BUS
(data pathway).
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,
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