TYAN THUNDER I7522 Manual page 51

Thunder i7520 / Thunder i75 20 R Appendix I: Glossary
of a communications channel. The two devices will then exchange messages back and forth in
order to settle on a communications protocol.
HDD: stands for Hard Disk Drive, a type of fixed drive.
H-SYNC: controls the horizontal synchronization/properties of the monitor.
IC (Integrated Circuit): the formal name for the computer chip.
IDE (Integrated Device/Drive Electronics): a simple, self -contained HDD interface. It can
handle drives up to 8.4 GB in size . Almost all IDEs sold now are in fact Enhanced IDEs
(EIDEs), with maximum capacity determined by the hardware controller.
IDE INT (IDE Interrupt): a hardware interrupt signal that goes to the IDE.
I/O (Input/Output): the connection between your computer and another piece of hardware
(mouse, keyboard, etc.)
Initial Program Load (IPL): a feature built into BBS-compliant devices, describing those
devices as capable of loading and executing an OS, as well as being able to provide control
back to the BIOS if the loading attempt fails.
IPL: see Initial Program Load.
IRQ (Interrupt Request): an electronic request that runs from a hardware device to the CPU.
The interrupt controller assigns priorities to incoming requests and delivers them to the CPU. It
is important that there is only one device hooked up to each IRQ line; doubling up devices on
IRQ lines can lock up your system. Plug-n -Play operating systems can take care of these
details for you.
Latency: 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 it
waiting for the peripheral to send some data back (peripherals tend to be slower than onboard
system components).
Mirroring: see RAID.
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): Compaq or IBM package other companies'
motherboards and hardware inside their case and sell them.
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 (Peripheral Component Interconnect): a 32 or 64- 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).
PCI PIO (PCI Programmable Input/Output) modes: the data transfer modes used by IDE
drives. These modes use the CPU for data transfer (in contrast, DMA channels do not). PCI
refers to the type of bus used by these modes to communicate with the CPU.
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