Chipset or glue logic and CPU
(Central Processing Unit)
Instructions:- Place your mouse over the rollover image and the image will change from showing a 486 CPU and Heat sink to displaying a Pentium CPU and Cooling Fan. Also, by holding the mouse over the image an associated image label can be seen.
A motherboard's control ICs- or chipsets- are also sometimes referred to as 'glue logic' and these control the flow of data between the key parts of your motherboard. The choice of chipset your motherboard uses can have a significant effect on your PC's overall performance.
Motherboard design is usually revoles around both a particular chipset and CPU. Also, new chipset designs tend to be developed to complement the launch of new CPU's. CPU's functions are:-to process information by fetching a program instruction stored in memory, executing the instruction and proceeding to the next step in the program.
The CPU consist of :-
(a) a program counter - this tells the CPU where it is in the program, (b) an instruction register that stores the current program instruction, (c) a control unit that decodes the contents of the instruction register, (d) data registers which store small units of data that the CPU is currently processing, (e) a memory address register which stores the address or memory location of the information in the data registers, (f) ALU (Arithmetric and Logic Unit)- performs each small step in a program, a status or flags - registers and displays information about the ALU.
The capacity of a CPU is defined by the length (rises expontentially i.e. 8, 16, 32) of its registers.
The CPU will be a large visible chip on the motherboard. It will frequently have a heat sink on top of it, which is basically a block of special material - normally black - which helps to dissipate heat generated by the CPU. Sometimes you will even find a fan on top of the CPU.
Some newer CPUs' such as Pentium 3, 4, come on expansion-type cards, which slot into the motherboard. these will look quite imposing with a chip, a large heat sink and possibly a fan all contained on the one card.