If you think your computer is off just because you pressed that shut down button then you are wrong! Ever wondered why your computer clock shows you the right time, even after your computer was shut down for about a week! A tiny chip usually called as CMOS chip which stands for Complementary Metal-Oxide Semiconductor is an on-board, battery powered semiconductor chip inside computers that stores information. This information ranges from the system time and date to system hardware settings for your computer. The picture shows an example of the most common CMOS coin cell battery used to power the CMOS memory.
The Motorola 146818 chip was the first RTC and CMOS RAM chip to be used in early IBM computers; capable of storing a total of 64 bytes of data. Since the system clock used 14 bytes of RAM, this left an additional 50 bytes for storing system settings.
If you have seen modern motherboard and couldn't see the CMOS and its battery, its because most of the companies have now moved to integrated CMOS to control I/0 ports like pci, USB, IDE , ISA etc. This is called as southbridge chip and used by manufacturers like nvidia , SIS.
PRAM
Short for Parameter RAM, PRAM is a small, battery-powered section in Apple Macintosh computers used to store basic settings such as the time and the data. PRAM is similar to IBM compatible computers' CMOS.
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The Motorola 146818 chip was the first RTC and CMOS RAM chip to be used in early IBM computers; capable of storing a total of 64 bytes of data. Since the system clock used 14 bytes of RAM, this left an additional 50 bytes for storing system settings.
If you have seen modern motherboard and couldn't see the CMOS and its battery, its because most of the companies have now moved to integrated CMOS to control I/0 ports like pci, USB, IDE , ISA etc. This is called as southbridge chip and used by manufacturers like nvidia , SIS.
PRAM
Short for Parameter RAM, PRAM is a small, battery-powered section in Apple Macintosh computers used to store basic settings such as the time and the data. PRAM is similar to IBM compatible computers' CMOS.
source
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