TYAN THUNDER K8HR Manual page 90

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.
PCI-to-PCI bridge: allows you to connect multiple PCI devices onto one PCI
slot.
Pipeline burst SRAM: a type of RAM that can maintain it's data as long as
power is provided to the memory chips. In this configuration, SRAM requests
are pipelined, which means that larger packets of data are sent to the memory
at one time, and acted upon quickly. This type of SRAM operates at bus speeds
higher than 66MHz.
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): software timers that count down the
number of seconds or minutes until the system times out and enters sleep,
suspend, or doze mode.
PnP (Plug-n-Play): a design standard that has become ascendant in the
industry. Plug-n-Play devices require little set-up to use. Novice end users can
simply plug them into a computer that is running on a Plug-n-Play aware
operating system (such as Windows 98), and go to work. Devices and operating
systems that are not Plug-n-Play require you to reconfigure your system each
time you add or change any part of your hardware.
PXE (Preboot Execution Environment): one of four components that together
make up the Wired for Management 2.0 baseline specification. PXE was
designed to define a standard set of preboot protocol services within a client,
towards the goal of allowing networked-based booting to boot using industry
standard protocols.
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