RPM refers to Red Hat Package Manager. It was originally developed by Red Hat which was thereafter used by different Linux distributions.
When making use of RPM, we can install / uninstall or Upgrade easily. It also manages the package / Versions and installed files on the system. It can optimize according to the requirements. RPM has applications that are required to run the softwares.
Some of the acronyms that are used are :
FC : Fedora Core
EL : Red Hat Enterprise Linux
Yd : Yellow Dog
CL : Conectiva Linux (now merged with Mandrake)
ASP : ASP Linux
Some of the architectures that are used are :
i386 : Intel 386
i486 : Intel 486
i586 : Intel 586
i686 : Intel 686
x86_64 : AMD 64 bits processors (AMD 64, Opteron)
ppc : Power PC
noarch : Platform-independent package