TYAN THUNDER K8HR Manual page 87

is also the possibility of losing your data should the system crash. Information
stored in a buffer is temporarily stored, not permanently saved.
Bus: a data pathway. The term is used especially to refer to the connection
between the processor and system memory, and between the processor and
PCI or ISA local buses.
Bus mastering: allows peripheral devices and IDEs to access the system
memory without going through the CPU (similar to DMA channels).
Cache: a temporary storage area for data that will be needed often by an
application. Using a cache lowers data access times, since the needed
information is stored in the SRAM instead of in the slow DRAM. Note that the
cache is also much smaller than your regular memory: a typical cache size is
512KB, while you may have as much as 4GB of regular memory.
Cache size: refers to the physical size of the cache onboard. This should not be
confused with the cacheable area, which is the total amount of memory which
can be scanned by the system in search of data to put into the cache. A typical
setup would be a cache size of 512KB, and a cacheable area of 512MB. In this
case, up to 512KB of the main memory onboard is capable of being cached.
However, only 512KB of this memory will be in the cache at any given moment.
Any main memory above 512MB could never be cached.
Closed and open jumpers: jumpers and jumper pins are active when they are
"on" or "closed", and inactive when they are "off" or "open".
CMOS (Complementary Metal-Oxide Semiconductors): chips that hold the
basic startup information for the BIOS.
COM port: another name for the serial port, which is called as such because it
transmits the eight bits of a byte of data along one wire, and receives data on
another single wire (that is, the data is transmitted in serial form, one bit after
another). Parallel ports transmit the bits of a byte on eight different wires at the
same time (that is, in parallel form, eight bits at the same time).
DDR (Double Data Rate): is a technology designed to double the clock speed
of the memory. It activates output on both the rising and falling edge of the
system clock rather than on just the rising edge, potentially doubling output.
DIMM (Dual In-line Memory Module): faster and more capacious form of RAM
than SIMMs, and do not need to be installed in pairs.
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