NOOB question, what is northbridge and southbridge?

[mapso]

Just wondering what are their functions..Read about it somewhere but i have bad memory. Any links to diagram and stuff is cool. Thanks a lot in advance....and flame on fellas.

 

[Mikki]

No flaming here bud, just helping hands. Don't have diagrams and I may be a bit off on this, but I'm sure all of us together will give you a good answer. Going by Intel P4 chipsets, basically the Northbridge is part of the chipset the controls data between the CPU and the AGP bus/memory bus. It's connected to the cpu by the FSB. The Southbridge is the chip that controls data for everything else...usb, audio, ide, etc. I know you can search Intel's site for specific chipsets and it'll have a diagram that'll help explain it. HTH!!!

 

[Toymaker]

Here's a basic picture of the 845PE chipset from Intel's website.
845PE chipset

The 82845PEGMCH is the Northbridge controller. The 82801DBICH4 is the Southbridge controller. The diagram shows you basically what motherboard main components are interfaced. Any added components like Firewire, serial ATA, etc are interfaced off the Southbridge. This is basically so that the bandwidth requirements of these "lesser" components don't interfere or subtract from the higher bandwidth requirements of the CPU, Video and RAM. hth