The main board's North Bridge Chip and South Bridge Chip

South Bridge Chip (South Bridge)

It is an important part of the Motherboard chipset. Generally, it is located at the far bottom of the motherboard from the CPU slot, near the PCI slot. This layout takes into account the many I/O buses it connects, A little farther away from the processor is conducive to wiring. Compared with the North Bridge Chip, the data processing capacity is not large, so the south bridge chip generally does not cover the heat sink. The nanqiao chip is not directly connected to the processor, but in a certain way (different vendors have different chipset types, such as Intel's intel Hub Architecture and SIS's Multi-Threaded "channel ") it is connected to the beiqiao chip.
Nanqiao chip is responsible for communication between I/O bus, such as PCI bus, USB, LAN, ATA, SATA, Audio Controller, keyboard controller, real-time clock controller, and advanced power management, these technologies are generally relatively stable, so different chipsets may have the same nanqiao chip. The difference is only the beiqiao chip. Therefore, the number of North-bridge chips in the Motherboard chipset is far greater than that in the south-bridge chip. For example, in earlier Intel, the kernel TX of Socket 7 of different architectures and the kernel lx of Slot 1 both use 82317AB, in the past two years, the 845E, 845G, 845GE, 845PE, and other configurations all use the ICH4 nanqiao chip, but they can also be used with the ICH2 nanqiao chip. What's more, some motherboard manufacturers produce a few products using the North-South Bridge is different chipset company products, such as the previously upgraded KG7-RAID motherboard, North Bridge uses AMD 760, south bridge is VIA 686B.
Nanqiao chip is mainly integrated with more functions, such as NIC, RAID, IEEE 1394, and even WI-FI wireless network. The larger chip in the middle is the nanqiao chip of the Main Board.

North Bridge Chip)

Is the most important component of the main board chipset, also known as the main bridge (host bridge ). Generally, the chipset name is named by beiqiao chip. For example, the intel 845e chipset's beiqiao chip is 82845e, And the 875p chipset's beiqiao chip is 82875p. The beiqiao chip is responsible for connecting with the CPU and controlling the memory and transmission of AGP data within beiqiao. It provides the CPU type and clock speed, the system's front-end bus frequency, and the memory type (SDRAM, ddr sdram, RDRAM, etc.) and support for maximum capacity, AGP slots, and ECC error correction. The integrated chipset's Northbridge chip also integrates the display core. The beiqiao chip is the chip closest to the CPU on the motherboard. This is mainly because the communication between the beiqiao chip and the processor is the closest, and the transmission distance is shortened to improve the communication performance. Because the data processing capacity of the beiqiao chip is very large and the calorific value is also growing, the current beiqiao chip covers the heat sink to enhance the heat dissipation of the beiqiao chip, some of the main board's North Bridge Chip will also work with the fan for heat dissipation. Because the main function of the beiqiao chip is to control the memory, and the memory standard changes frequently like the processor, the middleware chip of different chipsets must be different, of course, this does not mean that the memory technology used is completely different, but that there must be some differences between different chipset North Bridge chips.
As the amd K8 core CPU has been released to integrate the memory controller into the CPU, the Northbridge chip supporting the K8 chipset is much simpler, and even a single-chip chipset structure can be used. This may be a general trend. The functions of the beiqiao chip will gradually become uniform. to simplify the motherboard structure and improve the integration of the motherboard, in the future, the mainstream chipset may change to the Single-Chip Form of north-south bridge integration (in fact, many single-chip chipsets have been released earlier in SIS ).
Because each chipset product corresponds to a corresponding beiqiao chip, there are a large number of beiqiao chips. For different platforms, the current mainstream beiqiao chips have the following products (not including older products and only detailed descriptions of the most popular intel chipset) close to the CPU slot, the chip covered with silver-white heat sink is the North bridge chip of the motherboard.

 

Motherboard chipset (chipset) (pciset): divided into South Bridge and North Bridge

Nanqiao (main and external): system I/O chip (Si/O): mainly manages medium and low speed external devices, and integrates interrupt controller and DMA controller. Functions:

1) channels between PCI, ISA, and IDE.

2) PS/2 mouse control. (Indirect management of nanqiao, direct management of I/O)

3) keyboard ). (Keyboard)

4) USB control. (Universal Serial Bus)

5) clock control of the system clock system.

6) I/O Chip Control.

7) ISA bus.

8) IRQ control. (Interrupt request)

9) DMA control. (Direct access)

10) RTC control.

11) IDE control.

South Bridge Connection:

ISA-PCI

Bridge between CPU and peripherals

Memory-External Storage

 

North Bridge (main): the system control chip, mainly responsible for the communication between CPU and memory, and between CPU and AGP. Most projects are high-speed devices, such as CPU and host bus. Later, beiqiao integrated the memory controller and cache high-speed controller. The functions are as follows:

① Communication between CPU and memory.

② Cache control.

③ AGP control (Graphic acceleration port)

④ PCI bus control.

⑤ Communication between the CPU and peripherals.

⑥ Supports the control of memory types and maximum capacity. (Mark the grade of the motherboard)

Memory Controller: determines whether to read the memory (the advanced board is integrated with beiqiao ).