TYAN TRINITY KT-A Manual page 61

Bandwidth refers to carrying capacity. The greater the bandwidth, the more data the
bus, phone line, or other electrical path, can carry. Greater bandwidth, then, also results
in greater speed.
A BBS (Bulletin Board System) is a computer system with a number of modems
hooked up to it which acts as a center for users to post messages and access informa-
tion.
The BIOS (Basic Input/Output System) program resides in the ROM chip, and
provides the basic instructions for controlling your computer's hardware. Both the
operating system and application software use BIOS routines to ensure compatibility.
A buffer is a portion of RAM which is used to temporarily store data, usually from an
application, though it is also used when printing, and in most keyboard drivers. The
CPU can manipulate data in a buffer before copying it, all at once, to a disk drive.
While this improves system performance--reading to or writing from a disk drive a
single time is much faster than doing so repeatedly--there is the possibility of losing
your data should the system crash. Information stored in a buffer is temporarily
stored, not permanently saved.
A bus is 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).
A cache is a temporary storage area for data that will be needed often by an applica-
tion. Using a cache lowers data access times, since the needed information is stored in
the SRAM instead of in the slower 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 1GB 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 512MB 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.
S2390B Trinity KT-A
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