Location of the North and South Bridges:
The south bridge is located on the mainboard far below the CPU slot, in front of the PCI, that is, on the front side of the main box, this layout is to take into account that it is connected to the I\/O bus more, far away from the processor is conducive to wiring.
The Northbridge chip is located on the motherboard, the closest chip to the CPU, mainly considering that the communication between the Northbridge chip and the processor is the closest, and the transmission distance is shortened in order to improve the communication performance.
The role of the North bridge chip:
The Northbridge chip is responsible for communicating with the cpu and controlling the memory (limited to Intel cpus other than the Core series, AMD series cpus have integrated memory controllers in the cpu since the K8 series.
Therefore, the North bridge chip of AMD platform does not control the memory), AGP data is transmitted inside the North bridge, providing support for the type and main frequency of the CPU, the front-end bus frequency of the system, the type of memory (SDRAM, DDR SDRAM and RDRAM, etc.) and the maximum capacity, AGP slot, ECC error correction, etc. The integrated chipset's Northbridge chip also incorporates a graphics processor.
The role of the Southbridge chip:
The South bridge chip is mainly responsible for the control of some peripheral interfaces such as I\/O interfaces, the control of IDE devices and additional functions. Common ones are VIA 8235, 8237, etc.; INTEL has CH4, CH5, CH6 and so on. nVIDIA MCP, McP-t, MCP RAID, etc.