Chips on a motherboard are IC’s or integrated circuits, they are sometimes considered a single product and are engineered to work together as one unit. The integrated circuits in techno talk have been termed “chipsets.” They can also be found on video cards and sound cards and sometimes modems. On a mother board there are two sets of chips sets that your average computer geek will know by heart.
The North Bridge and the South Bridge. Often times the mother board manufacture will source out the engineering and design of the chips. I’m sure that you have heard of the very so popular VIA KT 800 chipset or the NVIDIA chips set. AMD and Intel also have there line of chipsets. Thorough out the 1980’s and into the 1990’s and still today there are chipsets specially design for high end video and sound cards.
Computer systems produced since the late 1980s often share commonly used chipsets, even across widely disparate computing specialties—for example, the NCR 53C9x, a low-cost chipset implementing a SCSI interface to storage devices and the like, could be found not only in Unix machines (such as the MIPS Magnum), but also in embedded devices and personal computers.
The Northbridge is traditionally one of the two chips in the core logic chipset on a PC motherboard, the other being the Southbridge. The Northbridge typically handles communications between the CPU, RAM, AGP port or PCI Express, and the Southbridge. Some Northbridge's also contain integrated video controllers. Because different processors and RAM require different signaling, a Northbridge will typically work with only one or two classes of CPUs and generally only one type of RAM.
There are a few chipsets that support two types of RAM (Generally these are available when there is a shift to a new standard). For example, the Northbridge from the NVIDIA nForce2 chipset will only work with Duron, Athlon, and Athlon XP processors combined with DDR SDRAM, the Intel i875 chipset will only work with systems using Pentium 4 processors or Celeron processors that have a clock speed greater than 1.3 GHz and utilize DDR SDRAM, and the Intel i915g chipset only works with the Intel Pentium 4 and the Intel Celeron, but it can use DDR or DDR2 memory. The name is derived from drawing the architecture in the fashion of a map. The CPU would be at the top of the map at due north. The CPU would be connected to the chipset via a fast bridge (the Northbridge) located north of other system devices as drawn. The Northbridge would then be connected to the rest of the chipset via a slow bridge (the Southbridge).
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