Star Micronics PCI/ISA System Board D6-IN - Manual (Page 67)

D6-IN System Board Manual
Parallel Port - A connection for a
printer or similar peripheral. Gener-
ally, parallel ports are output only. See
Bidirectional Parallel Port and ECP.
PCI - An acronym for Peripheral
Component Interconnect. A high per-
formance 32-bit or 64-bit bus devel-
oped by Intel Corporation. PCI is de-
signed to be independent of the hard-
ware architecture to ensure compat-
ibility with future computer systems.
See
EISA, VESA Local Bus and ISA.
Pentium - A high performance 64-bit
CISC processor designed and manu-
factured by Intel Corporation.
Plug and Play - A standard developed
to ensure easy installation of periph-
erals. Theoretically, a newly installed
card will automatically configure itself
and work properly without requiring
jumper configuration or device driv-
ers.
POST - An acronym for Power On
Self Test. A diagnostic program that
is run whenever the system is cold
booted.
RAM - An acronym for Random Ac-
cess Memory. A type of memory that
is used as the “working memory” of a
computer system. See DRAM and
SRAM.
ROM - An acronym for Read Only
Memory. A type of memory that re-
tains its data without requiring power.
Once written, it cannot be modified.
See EPROM and Flash ROM.
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 configu-
ration.
Shadow RAM - A technique used to
load a duplicate copy of BIOS from
slower ROM into faster RAM. This
enhances system performance be-
cause 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 Ran-
dom Access Memory. A type of
memory that can retain data without
requiring a regular clock signal. Al-
though they are faster than DRAM,
they hold less data and are more ex-
pensive.
Synchronous - Protocols that require
the clocks of communicating ma-
chines 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 struc-
ture spreads the cache access across
two or three cycles while maintaining
a bandwidth of one access per cycle.
Improves performance by 5-10%.
Glossary
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