Glossary of Terms

Select a Term

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


Copyright © 1998, Hank Kuo and Adam Labelson.