Micronics Twister AT Pentium, User Manual

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Twister AT System Board Manual
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.
APM - An acronym for Advanced
Power Management.
The APM speci-
fication defines a layer of software
that supports power management
in computers with power manage-
able hardware.
Asynchronous - Operations that do
not require the clocks of communicat-
ing devices to be coordinated. See Syn-
chronous.
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
number of modules on the same sys-
Glossary
Glossary
74
tem board. The buffered DIMMs come
with standard DRAM chips for 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
without 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 char-
acter.
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.
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 diagnos-
tics. See boot and warm boot.
CPU - An acronym for Central Pro-
cessing Unit. A CPU performs arith-
metic calculations, makes logical
decisions, and directs the operation of
the computer in conjunction with the
operating system.