The document discusses the main components of a motherboard, including the chipset, northbridge, southbridge, and data bus. The chipset contains components like the CPU, memory, and timers. The northbridge communicates between the CPU, graphics, and memory. The southbridge controls hardware like storage, I/O, sound, and networking. The data bus contains wires that transmit addressing information to describe memory locations for sending and retrieving data.

1. THE
MOTHERBOAR
D
By: Kevin Umanzor

2. What is a Motherboard?
 A motherboard (sometimes
alternatively known as the
mainboard, system board,
baseboard, planar board or
logic board, or colloquially, a
mobo) is the main printed
circuit board (PCB) found in
general purpose
microcomputers and other
expandable systems.
• It holds and allows
communication
between many of the
crucial electronic
components of a
system, such as the
central processing unit
(CPU) and memory,
and provides
connectors for other
peripherals.

3. Parts of a Motherboard

4. The Chipset
 A chipset is a group of microchips that are
designed to work with one or more related
functions that were first introduced in 1986 when
Chips and Technologies introduced the 82C206.
The original 82C206 chipset included the 82284
Clock Generator functions, 82288 Bus Controller,
8254 System Timer, dual 8259 Interrupt
Controllers, dual 8237 DMA controllers, and the
MC146818 Clock. Four of the 82C206 chips were later replaced
by CS8221 or NEAT (New Enhanced AT)
chipset that contained only three chips. This
was then replaced by the 82C836 SCAT
(Single Chip AT) chipset that combined all the
chips in the set into a single chip.

5. The Northbridge
 Alternatively referred to as the PAC (PCI/AGP
Controller) and nb, the northbridge is an
integrated circuit responsible for
communications between the CPU interface,
AGP, and the memory. Unlike the Southbridge
the Northbridge is directly connected to these
components and acts like a "bridge" for the
Southbridge chip to communicate with the
CPU, RAM, and graphics controller. Today, the
northbridge is a single-chip that is North of the
PCI bus, however, early computers may have
had up to three separate chips that made up
the northbridge.

6. The Southbridge
 The southbridge is an IC on the motherboard
responsible for the hard drive controller, I/O
controller and integrated hardware. Integrated
hardware can include the sound card and video
card if on the motherboard, USB, PCI, ISA, IDE,
BIOS, and Ethernet. The southbridge gets its
name for commonly being South of the PCI bus.
Below is a graphic illustration of the ASUS
P5AD2-E motherboard and some basic
explanations of each of the major portions of the
motherboard including the southbridge.

7. The Data Bus
 The bus contains multiple wires (signal lines) that
contain addressing information that describes the
memory location of where the data is being sent
or where it is being retrieved. Each wire in the
bus carries a single bit of information, which
means the more wires a bus has the more
information it can address. For example, a
computer with a 32-bit address bus can address
4GB of memory, and a computer with a 36-bit
bus can address 64GB of memory.