(1) Short for
Dual Independent Bus, a
bus architecture that is part of Intel's
Pentium Pro and Pentium II microprocessors. As its name implies, DIB uses two buses: one from the
processor to
main memory, and the other from the processor to the
L2 cache. The processor can access both buses simultaneously, which increases
throughput.
(2) Short for device-independent bitmap, the bit-mapped graphics format used by Windows. Graphics stored in DIB format generally end with a .bmp extension. It's called device-independent because colors are represented in a format independent of the final output device. When a DIB image is output (to a monitor or printer), the device driver translates the DIB colors into actual colors that the output device can display.
