What is the difference between northbridge and southbridge chipsets

Hardware Texpert says:. November 20, at AM Reply. Search This Blog. Subscribe to our RSS Feed. Follow Us on Twitter. Be Our Fan on Facebook. My Blog List. Email Clients Support. Catch all the email marketing buzz from around the world 6 years ago. Windows 7 Support. Microsoft Office Support. Internet Explorer Support. Firefox Support. These are communication bridges between the CPU and the peripherals connected to it.

Before talking about their importance in a PC. Northbridge is connected directly to the CPU via the front-side bus FSB and is thus responsible for tasks that require the highest performance. The northbridge was also named external memory controller hub MCH or graphics and memory controller hub GMCH is equipped with integrated graphics. The overall trend in processor design has been to integrate more functions into fewer components, which decreases overall motherboard cost and improves performance.

One of the advantages of having the memory controller integrated on the CPU die is to reduce latency from the CPU to memory. The northbridge plays an important part in how far a computer can be overclocked , as its frequency is commonly used as a baseline for the CPU to establish its own operating frequency. These are collectively known as Chip sets. The term chipset often refers to a specific pair of chips on the motherboard: the northbridge and the southbridge. Requests to resources not directly controlled by the northbridge are offloaded to the southbridge, with the northbridge being an intermediary between the processor and the southbridge.

The connection between the northbridge and southbridge does not have a common name, but is usually a high-speed interconnect proprietary to the chipset vendor. Before , any interaction between a CPU and main memory or an expansion device such as a graphics card s —whether AGP, PCI or integrated into the motherboard—was directly controlled by the northbridge IC on behalf of the processor.

The Athlon64 marked the introduction of an integrated memory controller being incorporated into the processor itself thus allowing the processor to directly access and handle memory, negating the need for a traditional northbridge to do so. As fewer functions are left un-handled by the processor, chipset vendors have condensed the remaining northbridge and southbridge functions into a single chip.

Skip to main content. Module 2: Computer Hardware. Don't have an account? Register now. Sign In using. Already a user? Sign in to JobBuzz. Please enter a valid email id. Password mandatory! Forgot password? Not you? Not using TJ? Create Account. Already a User? Old Fashioned?