Hardware glossary

Research cut-off date: 2026-07-22. Status: Phase 2, not yet written. This file states the scope of the work, the arguments it owns, and the research required to complete it. It contains no findings, because none have been sourced. See the changelog for phase status.

Scope

Definitional entries for accelerator and datacentre terminology used in chapters 16 and 17: memory capacity and bandwidth, interconnect, precision formats, utilisation, power usage effectiveness, and the units used throughout. Entries are definitional: no vendor specifications appear here, because those are dated facts that belong in the chapter with a source.

Research checklist

• Define every hardware term used in chapters 16 and 17.
• Define every precision format used in scripts/estimate_memory.py, with bytes per element.
• State the unit conventions, including gibibytes versus gigabytes, which are routinely conflated in vendor material.
• Record no vendor specifications in this file.

Completion criteria

This file is complete when every checklist item above is closed and the quality-control checklist in the research methodology passes.