System Unit – a case that contains electronic components of the computer used to process data.
Motherboard – the main circuit board of the system unit.
Computer Chip – a small piece of semiconducting material usually silicon, on which integrated circuits are etched.
Processor – interprets and carries out the basic instructions that operate a computer.
Multi-care processor – a single chip with two or more separate processor cores. Control Unit – the component of the processor that directs and coordinates most of the operations in the computer.
Arithmetic Logic Unit – performs (ALU) arithmetic, comparison and other operations.
System Clock – small quartz crystal circuit that controls the timing of all computer operation.
Clock Speed – the pace of the system clock that is measured by the number of ticks per second.
Bit (binary digit) – the smallest unit of data the computer can process.
Byte – when 8 bits are grouped together as a unit.
Kilobyte (KB) – equal to approximately 1 thousand bytes.
Megabyte (MB) – equal to approximately 1 million bytes.
Gigabyte (GB) – approximately 1 billion bytes.
Terabyte – approximately 1 trillion bytes.
RAM – (Random Access Memory) memory chips that can be read from and written to by the processor and other devices. Is also called main memory
Memory Module – a small circuit board that RAM chips usually reside on.
Memory Slots – holds memory module.
Memory Cache – helps speed the processes of the computer because it stores frequently used instructions and data.
Read-only Memory (ROM) – memory chips storing permanent data and instructions firmware, contain permanently written data, instructions, or information.
Flash Memory – a type of nonvolatile memory that can be erased electronically and rewritten.
Complementary metal-oxide semiconductor (CMOS) – technology used by some RAM chips, flash memory chips, and other types of memory chips that provides high speeds and consumes little