After all, what is a chipset? What are its functions? What is its importance? What is its influence in the computer performance? In this tutorial we will answer all these questions and more.

Chipset is the name given to the set of chips (hence its name) used on a motherboard.

On the first PCs, the motherboard used discrete integrated circuits. So a lot of chips were needed to create all the necessary circuitry to make the computer work. On Figure 1 you can see a motherboard from a PC XT.

click to enlarge
Figure 1: PC XT motherboard.

After some time the chip manufacturers started to integrate several chips into larger chips. So, instead of requiring dozens of small chips, a motherboard could now be built using only a half-dozen big chips.

The integration continued and around the mid-1990’s motherboards using only two or even one big chip could be built. On Figure 2 you can see a 486 motherboard circa 1995 using only two big chips with all necessary functions to make the motherboard work.

click to enlarge
Figure 2: A 486 motherboard, this model uses only two big chips.

With the release of the PCI bus, a new concept, which is still used nowadays, could be used for the first time: the use of bridges. Usually motherboards have two big chips: north bridge and south bridge. Sometimes some chip manufacturers can integrate the north and south bridges into a single chip; in this case the motherboard will have just one big integrated circuit!

With the use of bridges chipsets could be better standardized, and we will explain the role of these chips on the next pages.

Chipsets can be manufactured by several companies, like ULi (new name for ALi), Intel, VIA, SiS, ATI and nVidia. In the past other players were at the market, like UMC and OPTi.

A common confusion is to mix the chipset manufacturer with the motherboard manufacturer. For example, only because a motherboard uses a chipset manufactured by Intel, this not means that Intel manufactured this board. ASUS, ECS, Gigabyte, MSI, DFI, Chaintech, PCChips, Shuttle and also Intel are just some of the many motherboard manufacturers present in the market. So, the motherboard manufacturer buys the chipsets from the chipsets manufacturer and builds them. Actually there is a very interesting aspect of this relationship. To build a motherboard, the manufacturer can follow the chipset manufacturer standard project, also known as “reference design”, or can create its own project, modifying some things here and there in order to provide better performance or more features.

Here you can see a complete list of motherboard manufacturers.