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Firmware: low-level software that controls the system hardware.
Form factor: an industry term for the size, shape, power supply type, and external
connector type of the Personal Computer Board (PCB) or motherboard. The standard
form factors are the AT and ATX.
Global timer: onboard hardware timer, such as the Real-Time Clock (RTC).
HDD: stands for Hard Disk Drive, a type of fixed drive.
H-SYNC: controls the horizontal synchronization/properties of the monitor.
HyperTransport
TM
: a high speed, low latency, scalable point-to-point link for
interconnecting ICs on boards. It can be significantly faster than a PCI bus for an
equivalent number of pins. It provides the bandwidth and flexibility critical for today's
networking and computing platforms while retaining the fundamental programming model
of PCI.
IC (Integrated Circuit): the formal name for the computer chip.
IDE (Integrated Device/Drive Electronics): a simple, self-contained HDD interface. It
can handle drives up to 8.4 GB in size. Almost all IDEs sold now are in fact Enhanced
IDEs (EIDEs), with maximum capacity determined by the hardware controller.
IDE INT (IDE Interrupt): a hardware interrupt signal that goes to the IDE.
I/O (Input/Output): the connection between your computer and another piece of
hardware (mouse, keyboard, etc.)
IRQ (Interrupt Request): 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. Plug-n-Play operating systems can take
care of these details for you.
Latency: the amount of time that one part of a system spends waiting for another part to
catch up. This occurs most commonly when the system sends data out to a peripheral
device and has to wait for the peripheral to spread (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.
Parallel port: transmits the bits of a byte on eight different wires 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).