IBM 150 Manual Do Utilizador

RS/6000 43P 7043 Models 150 and 260 Handbook

techniques will continue to bring significant enhancements to the 
PowerPC.

  • The POWER3 architecture provides a significant impact to the market by:

  • Providing SMP scalability not found with POWER2

  • Redefining the versatility of a departmental computing solution by 

providing outstanding float-point performance with solid integer 
performance

  • Providing an affordable entry-level 32-bit and 64-bit solution

The Universal Serial Bus (USB) is a plug and play peripheral connection for 
devices such as keyboards, mice, joysticks, scanners, tablets, printers, and 
digital cameras, to name a few. USB could replace the serial and parallel 
ports with a single bus. 

USB supports many peripherals at one time. Special USB hubs will allow 
devices to be daisy-chained together. USB also distributes power to the 
attached devices, eliminating the need for dedicated peripheral power 
supplies.

Data flow in a USB is bidirectional. Devices can make use of this two-way 
communication to report status, or control other peripherals.

The Accelerated Graphics Port (AGP) is a high-bandwidth 32-bit PC bus 
architecture introduced in 1997 by Intel. It provides up to 528 MB/s memory 
access to a graphics controller, yielding the bandwidth necessary for complex 
tasks such as texturing directly from system memory. AGP is physically 
different from the PCI bus and does not replace PCI. AGP uses a 
combination of frame-buffer memory local to the graphics controller, as well 
as system memory for graphics data storage.

Although the AGP interface is very popular in the PC world, it has not become 
a standard. However, the importance of images, video, and graphics is 
growing. The next step in this evolutionary path is visual computing.

Visual computing is the convergence of high-performance 3D graphics, video, 
and digital imaging technologies to deliver a new class of interactive, intuitive, 
and life-like computing experiences to users.