Glossary of Terms

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Select a Term

Accelerated Graphics Port Bandwidth Benchmark Bitmap Bus Cache Direct Memory Execute Graphics Address Remapping Table Integrated Drive Electronics Peripheral Component Interconnect Pipelining Pixel Random Access Memory Sideband Addressing 

Accelerated Graphics Port (AGP) - a new platform bus specification that enables high performance graphics capabilities, especially 3 dimensional

Bandwidth - the amount of data a network can transport in a certain period of time; the capacity for the rate of transfer, which is usually expressed in bits per second

Benchmark - individual programs or a mixture of programs that are run in a target computer to measure the overall performance of the system, or to measure more specific aspects of the performance, such as graphics applications, I/O processing, etc.

Bitmap - a file that indicates a color for each pixel along the horizontal axis or row and a color for each pixel along the vertical axis

Bus - a transmission path on which signals are dropped off or picked up at every device attached to the line

Cache - a small fast memory buffer that hold a copy of the most recently used or most active portions of the larger slower memory

Direct Memory Execute (DIME) - allows for video card to use some of the main memory for texture memory with 3D graphics. Usually  video cards have 4 MB of RAM, some have 8 MB of RAM, but DIME allows for 12, 16, or even more memory to be used by allocating some of the main system memory

Graphics Address Remapping Table (GART)  - the built-in chipset hardware, which translates addresses, allowing the graphics controller and its software to see a contiguous space in main memory, when in fact the pages are disjointed

Integrated Drive Electronics (IDE) - is a standard electronics interface used between a computers motherboard's data path or bus and the computer's disk storage device

Peripheral Component Interconnect (PCI) - an interconnection system between a microprocessor and attached devices in which expansion slots are space closely for high speed operation

Pipelining - an implementation technique whereby multiple instructions are overlapped in execution

Pixel - the basic unit of programmable color on a computer display or in a computer image

Random Access Memory (RAM) - the read/write memory used by the computer

Sideband Addressing - technique that allows address information to be presented to the bus concurrent with a data transaction

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Copyright © 1998, Hank Kuo and Adam Labelson.