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PC Architecture. A book by Michael B. Karbo

PC Architecture. A book by Michael B. Karbo

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traffic systems.<br />

Fig. 42. Bridges connect the various busses together.<br />

The entire bus system starts close to the CPU, where the load (traffic) is greatest. From here, the<br />

busses work outwards towards the other components. Closest to the CPU we find the working storage.<br />

RAM is the component which has the very greatest data traffic, and is therefore connected directly to<br />

the CPU <strong>by</strong> a particularly powerful bus. It is called the front side bus (FSB) or (in older systems) the<br />

system bus.<br />

Fig. 43. The <strong>PC</strong>’s most important bus looks after the “heavy” traffic between the CPU and RAM.<br />

The busses connecting the motherboard to the <strong>PC</strong>’s peripheral devices are called I/O busses. They are<br />

managed <strong>by</strong> the controllers.<br />

The chip set<br />

The motherboard’s busses are regulated <strong>by</strong> a number of controllers. These are small circuits which<br />

have been designed to look after a particular job, like moving data to and from EIDE devices (hard<br />

disks, etc.).<br />

A number of controllers are needed on a motherboard, as there are many different types of hardware<br />

devices which all need to be able to communicate with each other. Most of these controller functions<br />

are grouped together into a couple of large chips, which together comprise the chip set.

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