Key Terms

Accelerated Graphics Port (AGP)

Alpha

arithmetic operations

arithmetic/logic unit (ALU)

ASCII (American Standard Code for Information Interchange)

binary system

bit (binary digit)

bus lines or buses

byte

cache

central processing unit (CPU)

coding scheme (or code)

complementary metal oxide semiconductor (CMOS)

complex instruction set computing (CISC)

control unit

DIMMs

DRAM

EBCDIC (Extended Binary Coded Decimal Interchange Code)

equal-to condition

E-time (execution time)

expansion boards or interface cards or adapter cards

expansion slots

external or Level 2 (L2)

Flash memory

gigabyte (GB)

gigahertz (GHz)

greater-than condition

IEEE 1394 (FireWire)

Industry Standard Architecture (ISA)

instruction set

Internal or Level 1 (L1)

internal storage

I-time (instruction time)

kilobytes (KB or K)

L3

less-than condition

logic chip

logical operations

machine cycle

main memory

main storage

megabyte (MB)

megaflop

Memory

microprocessor

microsecond

millisecond

MIPS

monolithic

motherboard

nanosecond

nonvolatile

not-equal-to

parallel port

Parallel processing

PC Card

Pentium 4

Peripheral Component Interconnect (PCI)

petabyte (PB)

picosecond

Pipelining

ports

PowerPC

primary memory

primary storage

PROM

RAM

Random-access memory (RAM)

RDRAM

Read-only memory (ROM)

Registers

relational operators (=, >, <)

RISC (reduced instruction set computing)

SDRAM

Semiconductor memory

serial port

SIMMs

SRAM

symbolic address

system bus

system clock

system unit

terabyte (TB)

teraflops

transistors

Unicode

Universal Serial Bus (USB)

volatile

word