Micronics M54E2 PCI/EISA Computer Hardware User Manual


 
Glossary
G-4
M54E2 System Board Manual
SCSI II - An interface standard that adds
features to the SCSI standard. These
include 32-bit data transfer, command
queuing, Fast SCSI, and support for a
wider variety of peripherals.
SCSI III - A proposed standard that will
support transfer rates of up to 40MB/sec.
Serial - A type of data transmission in
which the data is sent one bit at a time
over a single wire. See Parallel.
Serial Port - A communications port
used to connect peripherals such as
modems and mice.
Setup - A program that allows you to
make changes to the system configura-
tion.
Shadow RAM - A technique used to
load a duplicate copy of BIOS from
slower ROM into faster RAM. This
enhances system performance because it
provides higher access speed to the
BIOS.
SIMM - An acronym for Standard Inline
Memory Module. A small printed circuit
board containing memory chips.
SRAM - An acronym for Static Random
Access Memory. A type of memory that
can retain data without requiring a
regular clock signal. Although they are
faster than DRAM, they hold less data
and are more expensive.
Synchronous - Protocols that require the
clocks of communicating machines or
devices to be coordinated.
Synchronous Cache - A type of cache
that uses a clock signal to latch the
inputs and the data output. This
structure spreads the cache access across
two or three cycles while maintaining a
bandwidth of one access per cycle.
Improves performance by 5-10%.
Terabyte - A measurement for very, very
large storage capacity. One Terabyte is
equivalent one-thousand gigabytes, one-
million megabytes, or 1,099,511,627,766
bytes.
VESA - An acronym for Video Electron-
ics and Standards Association.
VESA Localbus (VL-Bus) - A high
performance bus designed by VESA. A
32-bit version of the ISA bus which
operates at the speed of the computer’s
CPU. See PCI, EISA and ISA.
VGA - An acronym for Video Graphics
Array. A standard for monitor displays.
VR - Pentium CPU voltage ranging from
3.300 - 3.465 Volts.
VRE - Pentium CPU voltage ranging
from 3.400 - 3.600 Volts.
Warm Boot - Restarting the system by
simultaneously pressing the <Ctrl>,
<Alt> and <Delete> keys.
Write-Back Cache - Upon a cache hit,
the cache is updated and the main
memory is not affected. Upon a cache
miss, only the main memory is updated.
Write-Through Cache - Upon a cache
hit, the cache and the main memory are
updated. Upon a cache miss, only the
main memory is updated.