CHIP SET

Courtesy: Sheikh Forhad Rahaman, Student, Dept. of EEE, Green University of Bangladesh

One of the main and one of the most important components you'll find on the motherboard is the chip set.Older motherboard  were designed with a lot  of different  chips scattered allover the motherboard. there ware chips for different  things, lie chips for bus controllers,memory controllers,Keyboard  controllers and so on.So they have a lot of different  functions on the Motherboard. So as technology  progressed comouter engineers  decides to reduce the number of chips and have then more in a centralized location so instead of having these different  chips scattered  all over the motherboard, controlling different  functions,they  reduced the number of chips todo the same job and condense then to only a few chips or what's  now called chipset.A chip set is a smaller set of chips that has replaced  a larger amount  of chips.thr chipset's job is to control  data flow between  the cpu,peripherrals,bus slots and memory. So all of the different  parts of the computer  communicate with the cpu through the chipset.The chipset basically  consists  of two chips. One is called  northbridge and other  is southbridge. North  bridge is located in Northern part of motherboard. Its also directly  connected  with cpu,memory The AGP and PCL-Express slots.South bridge  is located at the  southern portion  of the motherboard  nare the PCI slots. The south bridge connects thr PCI slots,SATA, IDE connectors  and USB ports.There is no direct connection  between the cpu and lower porti of the mother board . But those lower portion  arts needed to communicate with cpu.the information  has to go through the south bridge and then Through the North  bridge  and then to the CPU.North bridge  is faster then South bridge  because the CPU.high speed components connected  with North bridge  and the slower components  connected  with south bridge. Both bridge make connections to various  parts of the motherboard using pathway  called bus.Bus is a set of  pathways that allows  data and signals to travel  Between  components  on motherboard.The mother board contains several kinds of buses that vary in speed and bandwidth.. As example  bus speed is set to 66MHz means that particular  bus can send data at 66million cycles per second. The higher the bus speed,the faster the computer  can send data which improves the performance  of  the computer.A motherboards bus speed generall rafers to the speed of the front side bus.The front side bus is the connection between the cpu and the northbridge chipset.