TYAN TOMCAT I815E Manual page 55

Form factor is an industry term for the size, shape, power supply type, and external
connector type of the PCB (personal computer board) or motherboard. The standard
form factors are the AT and ATX, although TYAN also makes some Baby-AT boards.
AGlobal timer is an onboard hardware timer, such as the Real Time Clock.
Handshaking is a form of encryption. One system, typically the server, sends an
encryption scheme to another agent, typically a client. Thus, the client's data is
protected during transmittal to the server.
HDD stands for Hard Disk Drive.
H-SYNC controls the horizontal properties of the monitor.
IC (Integrated Circuit) is the formal name for the computer chip.
IDE Integrated Device (or Drive) Electronics is a simple, self-contained hard drive
interface. It can handle drives up to 8.4GB in size. Almost all IDEs sold now are in fact
Enhanced IDEs (EIDEs).
IDE INT (IDE Interrupt) is a hardware interrupt signal that goes to the IDE.
I/O (Input/Output) is the connection between your computer and another piece of
hardware (mouse, keyboard, etc.).
IRQ An Interrupt Request is 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. Happily, Plug and
Play operating systems take care of these details for you.
ISA (Industry Standard Architecture) 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 (Peripheral Component Interconnect) 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).
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