Motherboards and Processors

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Motherboards and Processors
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Format of this week Lecture and Tutorial

• Motherboard and Processor
• How frequent changed? Why?
• Dying or growing technology?
• Costs?

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Introduction or refresher

• Bits and Bytes
• A bit (symbol b) is a single on/off switch, 2
  states (value 0 or 1)
• A byte (B) is a group of 8 bits one
  letter/character (value 0..255)
• Bytes are the basis of computer data storage
• Network speed often shown in shorthand
• Fast Ethernet cards allow 100 Mbps data
  transfer
• Is this saying 100 megabits per second or 100
  megabytes per second?
• Its a difference of a factor of eight, so you
  had better be sure!

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Introduction or refresher

• Sizes
• Kilo one thousand (or 1024, closest binary
  number)
• Mega one million (or 10241024 in binary)
• Giga one US billion (102410241024)
• So one Megabyte (1MB) of memory has 1,048,576
  bytes
• But one Megabit (1Mb) is only 131,072 bytes
  (128KB)
• Speeds xyz per second is common in computing
• Things per second Hz Hertz (after George
  Hertz, scientist)
• One megahertz is 1MHz, one million times per
  second

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Introduction to Motherboards

• A motherboard is also known as a mainboard or a
  mobo in web slang
• Motherboard complexity has been driven by
• changes in the various system buses
  (connectivity)
• changes in CPU speed
• the integration of system devices
• Sound, LAN, Video, USB2, IDE/PATA, SATA,
  FireWire
• Now appearing Bluetooth, WiFi

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The PC/AT

• The IBM PC/AT originally used a 6MHz 80286 chip,
  rapidly upgraded to 8MHz.
• The 286 is a 16-bit device with a 24-bit address
  bus (16MB RAM).
• The AT introduced a 16-bit expansion bus but kept
  some 8-bit connectors.
• The whole motherboard ran at full processor speed.

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Fast PC/AT motherboards

• Processor speeds increased but the AT bus (later
  called the ISA bus) was fixed at 8MHz.
• This led to a separation of CPU speed and
  expansion bus speed.

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Fast PC/AT motherboards

• Later (about 1987) the i386 became available,
  with a 32-bit data bus. It could run faster than
  the normal type of RAM!
• The glue chipset connects to the various buses
  (16 and 32-bit) at various speeds
• This glue logic hides a lot of complexity

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Anatomy of a Motherboard
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Chipset

• Chipset uses two physicals chips North Bridge
  and South Bridge
• North Bridge
• Memory controller hub
• Core chipset that handles the communication
  between CPU, RAM, AGP, PCI-E and South Bridge
• South Bridge
• Chipset that handles the communication between
  North Bridge, PCI, ISA and other I/O devices such
  as USB, Firewire and Gigabit Ethernet

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Form Factor

• Form Factor defines the physical size power
  supply and mounting hole location.
• ATX
• Standard type of motherboard
• BTX
• Tried to replace ATX form factor for lower
  voltage to reduce the heat dissipation from the
  processor.
• Unsuccessfully because new processor has lower
  power requirements

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Modern systems - common figures

• The ISA expansion bus 8.33MHz vanished years
  ago
• The PCI expansion bus ran at 66MHz for a total of
  about 1Gbps (one gigabit per second)
• The PCI-e expansion bus runs at 5Gbps per lane
  with up to 32 lanes per device!

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Sockets and Slots

• The original Pentium class CPUs used Socket 7
• In 2004, Intel processors used Socket 478 and
  604 with Socket 370 just going.
• By 2006, Intel was using Socket 775.
• ZIF lever

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Sockets and Slots

• In 2004, AMD CPUs used Socket A and Socket 754,
  with Socket 940. These sockets are
  unavailable/obsolete.
• By 2006, AMD was phasing out Socket 939 and had
  introduced Socket AM2 and Socket 1204!
• The trend is clear motherboard and processor
  development is continuing apace.

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Processor Characteristics

• Socket type
• Clock speed
• Front Side Bus (FSB) - Connection speed between
  the processor and the chipset. Latest FSB1333.
• Cache size level 1 (L1)cache and level 2 (L2)
  cache.
• Single core or multi-core - ensures that system
  remains more responsive even when the processor
  load is high

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Why Replace Your Old Motherboard?

• Motherboard has failed
• Need additional features
• Compatibility of new hardware

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Summary

• We have discussed the components on the
  motherboard
• Chipset
• ISA, PCI and PCI-E
• We have also discussed some basics of the
  processor
• Characteristics
• Socket