In the past, chipsets were made up of several chips, gradually reduced to just two. In computing, the term "chipset" usually refers specifically to the chip on a computer's motherboard or expansion card. When discussing personal computers based on Intel's Pentium class processors, the term chipset usually refers to the two main chips on the motherboard: Northbridge and Southbridge.
Chipset manufacturers can and usually are independent of motherboard manufacturers. For example, PC motherboard chipsets include NVIDIA's nForce chipset and Via Electronics' KT880, both developed for AMD processors, or many chipsets from Intel. MCU chipsets have been introduced for many years, such as SiS 730. But it's only recently that nForce 4 has become popular. Today's single-chip chipsets are not as complex as before, because the Athlon 64 has a built-in memory controller, replacing northbridge's function.
Even when chipsets become microcontrollers, the old name is customarily used. It can be classified according to the usage, the number of chips and the level of integration. According to the number of chips, it can be divided into the standard South and North Bridge chipsets (the north Bridge chip plays a dominant role, also known as the Host Bridge). And multi-chip chipset (mainly used for high-grade server/workstation), according to the degree of integration into integrated chipset and non-integrated chipset and so on. Motherboard chipset almost determines all functions of the motherboard. Northbridge chip provides support for CPU type and dominant frequency, system cache, mainboard system bus frequency, memory management (memory type, capacity and performance), graphics card slot specifications, ISA/PCI/AGP slot, ECC error correction and other support; The Southbridge chip provides I/O support, KBC(keyboard controller), RTC(Real-time Clock Controller), USB(Universal Serial Bus), Ultra DMA/33(66)EIDE data transfer mode, and ACPI(Advanced Energy Management) support. And determine the type and number of expansion slots and the type and number of expansion interfaces; The highly integrated chipset greatly improves the reliability of system chips, reduces failures and reduces production costs. For example, some chipsets incorporating 3D accelerated display (integrated display chip), AC'97 sound decoding and other functions also determine the display performance and audio playback performance of the computer system.
Chipset identification this is also very easy, take Intel440BX chipset as an example, its Northbridge chip is Intel 82443BX chip, usually in the motherboard near the CPU slot, due to the high heat of the chip, in this chip is equipped with heat sink. The Southbridge chip is located near the ISA and PCI slots and is named Intel 82371EB. The other chipsets are arranged in basically the same position.