Motherboard

• It is a PCB (Printed Circuit Board)
• Need to complete the learning someday!
• we have two clocks, system and realtime clock
• Core Components
  • CPU Socket
  • RAM/DIMM Slots
  • Chipset
  • Expansion slots
    • PCIe (Peripheral Component Interconnect Express)
• Storage Interfaces
  • SATA: HDD/SSD
  • M.2: NVMe SSD
• Power and connectivity
  • Power connectors
  • BIOS chip
  • CMOS battery
• Wifi, Bluetooth, Ethernet, USB?

Form Factor (Size)

• ATX
• MicroATX
• MiniATX

CPU Socket

• CPU is installed here
• CPU can be removed
• Motherboard specifies what CPU it can support

Chipset

• manages flow b/w processor, memory, peripherals
• usually designed to work with family of processors, memory and peripherals
• It is non-removable and permanently soldered onto motherboard
• CPU is not part of Chipset
• it contains North bridge, South bridge and keyboard I/O controller
• In modern computing, these functions have largely been integrated directly into the CPU itself

North Bridge

• main cache memory
• AGP/PCIe (graphics)
• can include integrated graphics
• has heatsink/fan
• connects to CPU via Front side bus (FSB)
• connects CPU to L2 cache via Back side bus (BSB)
• Fast

South bridge

• Realtime clock
• power management
• PCI bus/USB controller
• Slow

SoC

• System on Chip
• CPU, graphics, memory controller and chipset are all baked into one single package
• It is non-removable

Interfaces

• CPU socket
  • CPU
• PCI (Express)
  • Graphics card, expansion cards
• USB
  • Printer, Camera, Flashdrive
• Firewire
  • HDD, Camcorder
• SATA
  • HDD/Optical Drive
• GBP
  • process control instruments

HDD interfaces

• SCSI
• IDE
• PATA
• SATA
  • 6 GBps
  • supports hot plugging: component can be replaced without having to shutdown computer
• AHCI
  • open source

RAM slots

• SIMM
  • SIMM RAM
• DIMM
  • SDRAM
  • DDR (Dual Data Rate)
    • (DDR-1, DDR-2, etc.)
• RIMM
  • Rambus RAM