Chapter 1 Flashcards
Motherboard
A circuit board to which all computer components are directly or indirectly
attached.
ATX (Advanced Technology Extended)
A motherboard form factor that followed the AT motherboard and that has given rise
to many modern motherboard form factors, such as micro ATX. The ATX motherboard
was the first to feature the 20-pin power supply connector that today’s 24-pin connector is
based on.
micro ATX
A motherboard form factor smaller than but based on the ATX form factor.
ITX
A family of motherboard form factors used in smaller systems, such as the home
theater PC.
Frontside Bus (FSB)
The high-speed bus controlled by the Northbridge on which RAM,
cache (in the absence of the backside bus [BSB]), PCIe slots, AGP slots, and other local-bus
components are interconnected with the CPU and, in some cases, each other.
Backside Bus (BSB)
The optional communications pathway between the Northbridge and
the cache controller. When the backside bus is absent, the cache controller communicates
with the Northbridge over the frontside bus.
Southbridge
The functional part of the chipset that controls nonlocal bus communication
among components connected to the various I/O buses, including PCI, IDE, USB, RS-232,
and parallel. See also Northbridge and chipset.
Bus
A set of signal pathways that allows information and signals to travel between
components inside or outside of a computer. A computer contains three types of buses:
the external bus, the address bus, and the data bus.
Chipset
The set of controller chips that monitors and directs the traffic on the motherboard
between the buses and components.
Northbridge
The functional part of the chipset that controls local-bus communication
among components connected to the frontside bus, such as the CPU, memory and cache,
and AGP/PCIe slots.
Expansion bus
A bus that connects I/O ports and expansion slots to the motherboard
chipset. The expansion bus allows the computer to be expanded using a modular approach.
When you need to add something to the computer, you plug specially made circuit boards
into the expansion slots on the expansion bus. The devices on these circuit boards are then
able to communicate with the CPU and are part of the computer.
Accelerated Graphics Port (AGP)
A local-bus expansion slot designed to meet the need
for increased graphics performance.
PCI
Peripheral Component Interconnect. A popular expansion slot architecture invented
by Intel that succeeded the ISA slot and that is succeeded by PCIe.
PCIe
PCI Express. A high-performance serial local-bus slot architecture that obviates the
need for AGP and PCI slots. PCIe support combining the resources of multiple adapters for
higher performance.
Up-plugging
The act of plugging a PCIe adapter into a slot that supports more lanes than
the adapter supports.
(CNR)
Communications networking riser. A specialized slot appearing one at a time in
motherboards manufactured before motherboard integration of NICs, audio, and modems
became commonplace.
RAM random access memeory
slots that hold memory chips that make up primary memory that is used to store currently used data and instructions for the CPU.
SODIMMs
Small-outline DIMM. A small form factor memory module based on DIMM principles and designed for the mobile computing sector.
DIMM
A memory module packaging style that features a circuit board with independent pins on both sides of the module’s card edge.
