What are chipsets and what purpose do they hold?
Apr 29 '01 (Updated Aug 19 '04)
The Bottom Line Before you buy a motherboard or computer you should know what chipset is supporting the processor and what it's benefits are.
So, what are chipsets?
All motherboards use a set of microchips (also known as chipsets) to aid the main processor in routing the transfer of data between components in the computer such as video, memory and disk drive controllers to the CPU. There are two main "chips" that are responsible for handling the data busses.
And a bus is?
A bus is basically a data path that information is routed through to get from one place to another (similar to people riding a bus to get somewhere). The frontside bus is the data path between the main processor (CPU) and the cache memory (which is now mostly found on the processor itself). The frontside bus feeds data to the CPU from the cache. The main RAM also has a bus to the CPU as well as the peripheral card slots. The busses are connected by bridges that allow information to pass from one bus to another as needed.
And what does a chipset do? How does it work?
The purpose of the two chips in the chipset is to handle the bridges that connect the busses by routing the information to its correct destination. The chip that handles the AGP bus (accelerated graphics port) and the main memory bus is usually refered to as the North bridge. The chip that controls the PCI/ISA bus is commonly refered to as the South bridge. There are several "bridges" on a motherboard that are controlled by these two chips such as the ISA to PCI bridge, PCI to CPU bridge and the AGP to CPU bridge.
Advancements in technology have enabled better and faster chipsets allowing faster video processing as well as faster memory to become reality. When people think of a computers speed they often only consider the CPU or the megahertz of the main processor when the chipset along with many other aspects of a computer make up the overall throughput speed rating. For example, if you have an older Intel motherboard that uses a LX chipset, a newer Intel board with an i8xx chipset and put the same Pentium III 500MHz processor and GeForce 2 video card on them both you will see much better video performance on the i8xx chipset even though the video cards and processors are the same. The reason for this is the newer chipset allows the accelerated graphics to perform at 4x while the older chipset only supports it at 1x. You would notice a drastic difference in this scenario.
In this same situation you could take advantage of faster memory on the newer motherboard which would also greatly enhance the performance. The chipset itself is not directly responsible for the increased performance but it allows for faster and better components to be used to their full potential to get the performance increase.
Where do they come from?
Chipsets are made by a variety of manufacturers including Intel and AMD. One of the biggest manufacturers of these microchips is VIA. VIA makes chips for AMD and Intel processor based motherboards and can be found on many of the most respected names on the market like Epox, ASUS, A-bit, and Gigabyte boards.
Some AMD based boards even use a combination of chips to get the best available performance like the FIC SD-11 which uses a combination of the AMD 751 North side chip with the VIA 686A South side chip. At the time the board was developed the AMD 751 was the best North side chip and the VIA 686A was the best South side chip to use with the AMD Athlon processor, so FIC made a board with the best combination available.
The latest Intel North side chip designed for the Pentium 4 processor allows for 8x AGP video and a faster memory bus. Unfortunately the memory bus was designed for RDRAM memory which is very expensive. VIA has developed a North side chip for the P4 that will allow the use of DDR memory which is almost as fast but costs much less. When you shop for a motherboard or a computer you may want to ask what chipset is used and read up on the pros and cons of the different chips and their supported processor before buying. You may be suprised at the differences available.
I hope this helps to explain what a chipset is and what it does without being too technical. If you have questions or comments, feel free to email me. Thanks for reading.
Gr8ful :-)
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