Good to know: What is the chipset?

The chipset is an integral part of a Mini PC. The term describes the chips used for the northbridge and southbridge on the motherboard of a mainboard. 

What is the chipset responsible for?

The chipset is responsible for controlling the individual components of a PC as well as the peripherals. It also regulates the data transfer between the CPU, RAM and the graphics card. 

Structure of the chipset in Northbridge and Southbridge

The Bridge architecture developed by Intel has established itself on the market. The chipset is divided into the Northbridge and the Southbridge. These have different functions and are responsible for different things.

The Southbridge controls the data transfer between the bus systems such as PCI or PCI Express. The USB controller is also located here. Power management functions and control of the network controller are also handled by the Southbridge.

The northbridge generally has a higher speed than the southbridge and is therefore responsible for the more important things. This includes the control of the CPU and its clocking, as well as the control of the memory modules.

Single-chip systems for ever smaller PCs

Computers, especially those like our mini PCs, are getting smaller and smaller. In such cases, the regular structure of a chipset, as described above, simply takes up too much space. The solution to this is so-called single-chip systems, in which as many functions as possible are accommodated on one chip. The Southbridge is an integral part of the Northbridge and its functions have simply been integrated into the Northbridge. We have already explained how this works in our blog post about SoC.

Good to know: What is SoC?