Explaining Chipsets, the Defining Piece of Your Motherboard
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When buying a motherboard, by far the most important thing to consider is the chipset. If you are building your own computer, you should shop specifically by the chipset, then consider the other features of the board. If you're new to building computers, it helps to have some idea of what these chips do to make your system run.
What is the most important part of your computer? The motherboard, of course, but what is the most important part of the motherboard? You might think it is the CPU, but really, it is the chipset. If the CPU is your computer’s brain, the chipset is its heart, and of course, one can’t function without the other.
Speaking less metaphorically, the chipset handles all data transfer; whenever the CPU needs to get or process information located in another part of the computer, be it the RAM, the hard drive, or what have you, the data goes through the chipset. It follows that any component on your computer that needs to communicate with the CPU does so through the chipset. You can identify your computer’s chipset by looking for the largest chips on your motherboard; the very largest will be the CPU, but the two next largest will be your chipset.
Chipsets actually used to be much larger in a sense. On early PCs, different functions went into different chips; consequently, a lot of chips went into one chipset. It wasn’t too long before some manufacturers figured out that it made sense to integrate several functions (chips) into a larger chip. Computers went from needing dozens of smaller chips to about a half-dozen large ones.
By the mid-1990s, chipset manufacturers came up with the configuration we see most commonly today: a chipset that features two large chips. The 486 motherboard went to this arrangement by 1995. It allows for a certain amount of standardization. The two chips in a chipset are now referred to as north bridge and south bridge, and the functions handled by each chip in the set are pretty similar across all chipset manufacturers. Some manufacturers will integrate the north and south bridges into a single huge chip!
This doesn’t mean you can mix chipsets, say, taking a north bridge from one and a south bridge from another. In fact, you can’t even if you wanted to; chipsets are soldered onto the motherboard. You can’t upgrade your system’s chipset unless you buy a whole new motherboard. This doesn’t mean that the company that made your motherboard also made your chipset, incidentally. Motherboard makers buy chipsets from chipset manufacturers. Often they’ll follow the chipset manufacturer’s suggestions as to building the motherboard around the chipset (referred to as a “reference design”), but they aren’t forced to. Some manufacturers will create their own designs for the motherboard, with various goals, such as improving the overall performance or providing better features.
Intel has started using something called the Intel Hub Architecture (IHA), moving away from the north bridge/south bridge chipset arrangement. However, the IHA chipset also has two parts: the Graphics and AGP Memory Controller Hub (GMCH) and the I/O Controller Hub (ICH). Looking at a diagram of an IHA chipset, the GMCH supports the same functions as the north bridge, and the ICH supports the same functions as the south bridge.
Next: The North Bridge >>
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