The following sections of this BookRags Literature Study Guide is offprint from Gale's For Students Series: Presenting Analysis, Context, and Criticism on Commonly Studied Works: Introduction, Author Biography, Plot Summary, Characters, Themes, Style, Historical Context, Critical Overview, Criticism and Critical Essays, Media Adaptations, Topics for Further Study, Compare & Contrast, What Do I Read Next?, For Further Study, and Sources.
(c)1998-2002; (c)2002 by Gale. Gale is an imprint of The Gale Group, Inc., a division of Thomson Learning, Inc. Gale and Design and Thomson Learning are trademarks used herein under license.
The following sections, if they exist, are offprint from Beacham's Encyclopedia of Popular Fiction: "Social Concerns", "Thematic Overview", "Techniques", "Literary Precedents", "Key Questions", "Related Titles", "Adaptations", "Related Web Sites". (c)1994-2005, by Walton Beacham.
The following sections, if they exist, are offprint from Beacham's Guide to Literature for Young Adults: "About the Author", "Overview", "Setting", "Literary Qualities", "Social Sensitivity", "Topics for Discussion", "Ideas for Reports and Papers". (c)1994-2005, by Walton Beacham.
All other sections in this Literature Study Guide are owned and copyrighted by BookRags, Inc.
The term cycle is applied to computer hardware in several different ways. Most fundamentally, there is the clock cycle, which determines the maximum rate at which any device in the computer can change its state. There are also instruction cycles, an instruction cycle being the complete round of events necessary to execute a single instruction at the machine-language level (e.g., instruction fetch, instruction decode, operand fetch, write result, etc.). The term cycle time refers specifically to the time required to access an item of information in a random-access memory chip. The cycle time of a memory chip is the time from the beginning of one access (i.e., the reading out or reading in of a binary word) to the beginning of the earliest possible next access. The components of cycle time include the latency of the chip and any transfer time involved. For a read cycle, a chip's latency is the time from the presentation of valid address and control signals at the chip's inputs to the appearance of valid data at the chip's outputs; transfer time is the time required to transmit the accessed data to its first destination. The definitions of latency and transfer time for a write cycle are similar.