Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) Chipsets
By Stephen Bucaro
Although most people think the microprocessor is the most important part on a computers
motherboard, the "chipset" is equally important. The chipset consists of a northbridge
chip that connects the microprocessor to the systems memory, and a southbridge chip
that provides connections to the hard drive and USB ports. The northbridge and southbridge
chips communicate over the Peripheral Component Interconnect (PCI) bus, which also provides
expansion slots.
AMD-750 Chipset
The AMD-750 was AMD's first chipset. It was designed to support Athlon and Duron processors.
The AMD-750 chipset consists of the AMD-751 system controller (Northbridge) and the AMD-756
peripheral bus controller (Southbridge).
Features:
• 200-MHz frontside bus
• PC-100 SDRAM (synchronous dynmaic RAM) with ECC (error correcting code)
• 2X AGP
• 32-bit 33-MHz PCI bus
• EIDE supporting ATA 33/66
• UDMA/66
• 4 port OHCI USB
• SMBus and ACPI
|