Many components, like memory and graphics controllers, are now integrated into and handled directly by the CPU. As these higher priority controller functions moved to the CPU, any remaining duties were rolled into one remaining southbridge-style chip. Instead, the old northbridge/southbridge architecture has ceded to a more modern, single-chip system. The old traditional northbridge and southbridge chipset design could obviously be improved upon, though, and steadily gave way to today’s “chipset”, which really isn’t a set of chips at all. The Steady March Towards Total Integration These chips came to be known as a “chipset”, because it was literally a set of chips. In order for these components to talk to the CPU, they had to first had to go through the southbridge, which then went to the northbridge, and from there to the CPU.

The southbridge was responsible for handling lower performing components such as the PCI bus slots (for expansion cards), SATA and IDE connectors (for hard drives), USB ports, onboard audio and networking, and more.

The southbridge, on the other hand, was located toward the bottom (southern portion) of the motherboard. Motherboard design became more and more efficient as time goes on. This chip was directly connected to the CPU and acted as a communication middleman for a system’s higher speed components: RAM (memory controllers), PCI Express controller, and on older motherboard designs, the AGP controller. If these components wanted to talk to the CPU, they had to go through the northbridge first. The northbridge chip was known as such because it was located at the top, or northern, portion of the motherboard. Instead of a bunch of chips, motherboards came with a northbridge and a southbridge, which consisted of just two chips with very specific duties and purposes. With the advent of the PCI bus, a new design emerged: bridges. In order to address this problem, computer engineers needed to devise a better system, and began integrating these disparate chips into fewer chips.

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