cycle stealing


cycle stealing

[′sī·kəl ‚stēl·iŋ] (computer science) A technique for memory sharing whereby a memory may serve two autonomous masters, commonly a central processing unit and an input-output channel or device controller, and in effect provide service to each simultaneously.

cycle stealing

A CPU design technique that periodically "grabs" machine cycles from the main processor usually by some peripheral control unit, such as a DMA (direct memory access) device. In this way, processing and peripheral operations can be performed concurrently or with some degree of overlap. See also peer-to-peer computing.