Unit 8: Vocabulary

An abbreviation; a way of writing a longer string of words more concisely.

IT is an acronym for Information Technology.

A measurement of the capacity of data which can be moved between two points in a given period of time.

The website performed very poorly because it was graphically heavy and required more bandwidth than was available.

A measurement or standard that serves as a point of reference by which process performance is measured.

The magazine article used PCMark 7 scores as a benchmark for computer performance.

The smallest unit of storage; normally referred to as a '1' or '0'.

The DBA "flipped a bit" in the database, changing a value from a 0 to 1.

8 bits.

One byte of data is enough memory to hold a single ASCII character.

The ability of a system component to fail without causing the entire system to shut down; this is often accomplished with redundancy.

Due to low fault tolerances in the new gaming console's GPU, the manufacturer had to issue a total recall.

A common measurement of computer speed dealing with decimal calculations in a given amount of time.

The more FLOPS a computer can do, the faster it is.

The number of cycles undergone per unit (time of a sound wave), most often measured in hertz.

The new processor ran at a much higher frequency than the one it replaced, going from 1.8 GHZ up to 4 GHZ.

One billion.

The word giga originally comes from the Greek word for 'giant'.

One billion bytes.

Modern hard drives can store 500 gigabytes of data or more.

One billion hertz.

How long will it be before the first 5-gigahertz processors become affordable?

An internationally used frequency unit; equals one cycle per second.

A human being can hear sound waves from 20Hz to 20,000Hz.

A very raw measurement of computer processor speed.

IPS is a base measurement of computer speed often expressed in millions (MIPS).

One thousand.

A kilobyte is 1024 bytes.

The power to which a number is raised -- the exponent; example: log 10^2 = 2.

Logarithms are used in many areas of science and engineering including computer science and geology.

One million.

One megabyte is 1,048,576 bytes.

One millionth.

Although micro means "one-millionth", many people use it to express simply "a great deal of smallness."

A prefix meaning one thousandth.

One millitesla is one-thousandth of a tesla.

One billionth.

The teacher said the word "nano" can also be used for anything very small, such as nanotechnology.

10 times bigger or smaller.

Computer processing power can increase by an order of magnitude between generations.

One trillion.

There are 1,099,511,627,776 bytes in a terabyte.