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Glossary
Glossary
16550 UART - A high speed chip for
controlling serial ports. Although un-
necessary for a mouse, it is required for
modems that are 14,400 baud or faster.
AGP - Accelerated Graphics Port. A
faster bus than the current 33MHz PCI
bus, which will connect the graphics
controller to system memory through
the chipset.
Asynchronous - Operations that do
not require the clocks of communicat-
ing devices to be coordinated. See Syn-
chronous.
Baby AT - A system board size measur-
ing approximately 10.8" x 8.6".
Bidirectional Parallel Port - A type of
parallel port that can send and receive
information.
BIOS - An Acronym for Basic Input/
Output System. Configures the system
board and provides hardware informa-
tion to the operating system.
Bit - A contraction of Binary digit.
The smallest unit of information in a
binary number system. A bit repre-
sents a choice between either zero or
one.
Boot - To start up the computer and
load the operating system software. See
cold boot and warm boot.
Buffered DIMMs - The 168-pin buff-
ered DIMM modules use buffer logic
chips on their control lines to reduce
loading on the system board. This buff-
ering action increases the maximum
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Micronics C400 System Board Manual
number of modules on the same system
board. The buffered DIMMs come with
standard DRAM chips for either 5V or
3.3V operation.
Bus - A group of electronic paths used
to send data between parts of the sys-
tem. On a system board, the bus con-
nects the peripheral cards with the
microprocessor via the expansion slots.
Bus Mastering - The ability of a
peripheral card to control the bus with-
out requiring intervention of the CPU.
Byte - A group of adjacent bits treated
as a unit. Eight bits are typically con-
sidered one byte. Also called a charac-
ter.
Cache - A process where information
is copied from the slower memory
(DRAM) to the faster memory
(SRAM). Information that is likely to
be read or edited is stored in the cache
providing significant performance in-
creases.
Cache Hit - The percentage of request
for data from memory that can be
served from the cache.
Cache Miss - A memory access which
cannot be supplied from cache.
Cold Boot - Starting the computer by
turning on the power or pressing the
RESET button. A cold boot makes the
processor execute all of the diagnostics.
See boot and warm boot.
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