One of the great secrets of the industry is that the motherboard chipset is an almost dispensable part right now, but they need its implementation to be able to sell CPUs much cheaper by forcing the sale of different board models. base with different specifications. However, the day will come when this will no longer be sustainable.
Motherboard chipset is getting smaller and useless
As time has passed and chips have been made with smaller transistors, much of the circuitry that crowded motherboards has been reduced. The highlight came when the memory controller, the so-called Northbridge, was absorbed by the central processor and already in recent generations certain high-speed interfaces, especially PCI Express, have also been absorbed by the CPU.
Today, the chipset of a motherboard is nothing more than the concentrator of various low-speed peripheral interfaces, which, if placed on the main chip, would end up expanding the area and cost of the chip due to the need to place them on the periphery. . The solution? Connect the chipset through a high-speed bus and let it be in charge of concentrating all the additional connectivity to a single chip.
Of course, to fully understand what the level of cut has been, we have to take into account that the management of the graphics card, the communication with the RAM memory and incidentally with the main SSD unit is done through the units that They are located in the central processor. What’s more, the chipset for practical purposes is still an expansion card to add more ports, but on the same PCB as the motherboard.
Would it be better if it was an expansion card?
We are not saying it to say, normally a series of PCI Express lines or an interface of the same speed are associated to communicate with the chipset. These lines can be routed to a PCIe x4 connector and give us two different options:
- Install a second M.2 SSD in the PC in case we need extra high-speed storage.
- Have an expansion card with ports for additional peripherals.
However, the trap of the current chipset is not found in the fact of granting more ports for peripherals, but in including a series of extra components that are connected to it. We are talking about things like integrated sound cards or network cards. However, their work does not depend on the chipset, but rather they are connected to the chipset and this could be solved by connecting each of them to a single PCIe line. After all, they do not require more bandwidth to work.
The reality is that in the end we find ourselves with a large number of ports on motherboards that we do not use and still pay for it. The fact of giving us the opportunity to choose the expansion capacity of our PC would be much better, apart from being a better way to take better advantage of the less and less used expansion card slots beyond the use of the corresponding graphics card.
