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Motherboard
It is the main circuit board of microcomputer.
It contains connectors for attaching additional boards.
Motherboard contain the CPU, BIOS ,memory, serial and parallel
port , expansion slot.
It is also called as mainboard , system board, logic board.
Abbreviated as mobo.

Form FACTOR
Shape and layout of the motherboard is called as form factor.
It contain physical dimension as well as certain connectors.
The form factor determines general layout, size and features.

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The list shows the dominant form factors and the time frame when
they ruled the world:--19??-1993

AT

1993-1997

Baby AT

1995-2004

ATX

2004-????

ATX or BTX (Balanced Technology Extended) or

other?

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TYPES OF MOTHERBOARD
PC/PC-XT(Personal Computer
Extended Tech.)

PC-AT(Personal Computer
Advanced Tech.)

It has Intel 8088 CPU

It has Ic 80286 and onwards CPU

40 pin dual inline package

68 pin package

Only 8 bit expansion slot

8 and 16 bit expansion slot

Maximum RAM memory 640KB

Maximum memory is 16MB

DIP switches are used for standard

configuration setting.

CMOS-RAM is used to store the

system configuration

PC Configuration
Pc configuration means all the peripheral devices connected
physically called as System configuration.

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Chipset architecture

Chipset means the set of the chips that interface with the CPU on
the motherboard.
It provides functionality to the computer system and controls over
various memory and peripheral devices.
There are two architecture:--1. North/ South bridge Architecture 2. Hub Architecture.

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North Bridge
Also called as Memory controller Hub(MCH)
It is directly connected to the CPU.
Control flow of data between CPU and RAM and to the AGP.
Heat sink is attached to it.
CPU, RAM, video card.

South Bridge
It is also called as I/O controller Hub (ICH).
It is connected by North Bridge.
Transfer data between hard disk and other I/O devices, and
passes this data into link channel which connects to the North
Bridge.
PCI, PCI-X, USB, ATA, BIOS, Keyboard.

Hub Architecture
Intel Hub Architecture (IHA) also known as Accelerated Hub
Architecture (AHA).
It uses North Bridge connected to south bridge via 266MB /s bus.
Connection is also called as Direct Media Interface (DMI).
The MCH support memory and AGP.
The ICH support PCI, USB, IDE, and Keyboard.

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BUS
Bus is an electronic path on which signals are sent from one part
of the computer to another.
It provides linear pathway that connects multiple devices to
provide a communication channel among them.
Communication is Bi-directionally with other devices connected to
that bus.
Data Bus:- Data bus is set of wire or tracks on the motherboard
.Used to transfer data from one point to another . No of data lines
determine the speed of data transfer
Address Bus:- set of wire or tracks on the motherboard which is
used to specify address of memory location.

Types of Buses on motherboard

ISA
EISA
PCI
PCI-X
AGP
Processor Bus
PCI Express

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8 bit ISA (industry standard architecture)

This bus is also referred to as classic AT bus.

It has total 62 contacts at the bottom of the adapter card, i.e. 31
on each side.
Eight Data lines
Four DMA channels
Eight IRQ levels
Enable to handle 1MB of memory.

Advantages
It supports old type of cards
low cost

Disadvantages
It is slower
Supports 8 bit devices only
Not suitable for modern PCs
Jumpers & DIP switches.
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16 bit ISA (AT with 286 processor)

It has another 36 new connector slots to the existing 8 bit ISA
slots.
8 bit ISA card can be connected to the 16 bit ISA slot without any
modification.
Eight more data lines.
Four more address lines
Four more DMA channels. (DMA:--- Direct Memory Access
channel . It is the system that can control the memory system
without using the CPU.)
Five IRQ levels. (IRQ:-- Interrupt Request Line/Levels. This are the
hardware lines over which devices can send interrupt signal to the
microprocessor.)
Old 8-bit cards

Advantages
Supports 16 bit CPU
Compatible with old 8 bit cards
low cost

Disadvantages
Not suitable for modern PCs
low speed
Jumpers & DIP switches.

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EISA (32 bit)(Extended Industry Architecture)

32 bit data path
Enough address lines for 4GB of memory.
More I/O address up to 64 kb.
No jumper or DIP switches.
8 MHz clock rate.
Support 8 bit ,16 bit ISA cards
Bus mastering. (It allows the peripheral devices to take the control
of the bus from CPU for a short time.)

Advantages
Support 8 bit and 16 bit ISA cards.
Bus Mastering
No jumper or DIP switches.
Address up to 4 GB.
Support 8 bit ,16 bit ISA cards
Support 64kb I/O addresses.
EISA permits greater system expansion with fewer adapter
conflicts.

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Disadvantages:
It has two row of connector.
Can handle 32 bit data at an 8 MHz clock rate.
Data transfer requires min 2 cycles.
Less bandwidth support.

PCI (Peripheral Component Interconnect)

32 bit High speed bus that connects high performance peripherals
like video adapters, disk adapters and network adapters to the
chipset.
Processor independent
Multi-master capability
Plug and play facility :
PnP means that you can connect a device or insert a card into your
computer and it is automatically recognized and configured to
work in your system.
3.3 and 5 volt logic
PCI 2.2, PCI 2.3, PCI 3.0

Features of PCI bus

1) Extremely high-speed data transfer:---32 bit wide data transfer at
the rate 33 MHz gives a maximum of 132 Mb per seconds. Data
transfer rate is 66 MHz.
2) Plug and play facility:-- we can connect a device or insert a card
into our device computer and its automatically recognized and
configured to work in our system.

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3) New approach:-It moves peripheral slots closer to the system bus,

thereby providing faster data transfer between the processor and
the peripheral.
4) Processor independence:-- It does not depend on the speed and
structure of the processor bus.
5) Full multi-master capability:--This allows PCI master to
communicate directly with other PCI master/slave.
6) Parity on both data and address lines:- This allows
implementation of robust system.
7) PCI 2.2 2.3,3.0,PCI-X.PXC-X 2.0 mini PCI Card bus Compact PCI.

PCI-X (Peripheral component Interconnect Extended)

PCI is officially processor-independent.
64-bit parallel bus
1.5 Volts signaling level.
PCI-X 1.0 doubled the maximum clock frequency that can be used
by PCI devices from 66 MHz to 133Mhz
PCI-X 2.0 supports maximum clock frequencies of 266 MHz and
533 MHz
Theoretical Max. Transfer Rate4 Gbytes/sec

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PCI Express
PCI Express is a serial based technology. Each serial link is called
as a Lane. Every lane is fully duplex.
High performance: Bandwidth increases as more lanes are
added.
I/O simplification: PCI-Express reduces the complexity of design
and cost of implementation.
Ease of usePCI Express offers both hot-swap and hot-plug
The PCI Express 1X connector has 36 pins and is intended for
high-bandwidth I/O use
The PCI Express 4X connector has 64 pins and is intended to be
used on servers
The PCI Express 8X connector has 98 pins and is intended to be
used on servers
The PCI Express 16X connector has 164 pins, is 89 mm long and is
intended to be used on the graphics port.
PCI Express 1.0 In 2004, Intel introduced PCIe1.0, with a data rate
of 250MB/s
PCI Express 2.0 T he PCIe2.0 standard doubles the per-lane
throughput from the PCIe1.0 standard's 250MB/s to 500MB/s
PCI Express 3.0 PCI Express 3.0 carry a data rate of 1 GB/Ss.

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Comparison PCI and PCI-X

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AGP (Accelerated Graphics Port)

The AGP interface was developed specifically to connect with the
video card bypassing the input-output controller.
AGP is currently being phased out in favor of PCI Express
The AGP bus is 32 bits wide and uses 66.66 MHz clock speed.
Reduced contention
The processor on the video adapter can directly access RAM on
the motherboard when needed.

Advantages of AGP over PCI.

1.AGP is dedicated pathway between slot and processor, rather
than sharing the PCI bus, allows faster communication.
2. AGP is capable of reading textures directly.

Features:1) Peak Bandwidth:- 4x the PCI bus. It request for Pipelined.

2) Direct Memory Execute of texture.
3) Reduced Contention with the CPU and I/O devices for bus and
memory access.
4) An Extra port to the graphics chip for memory access, so it can
concurrently read texture from AGP memory while
reading/writing pixel from local memory.

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5) Allowing the CPU to write directly to shared system AGP memory

when it needs to provide graphics data, such as command or
animated texture.

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Processor Bus (Front Side Bus)

The processor bus is the communication pathway between the
CPU and motherboard chipsetmore specifically the North Bridge
or Memory Controller Hub.
This bus also transfers data between the CPU and external cache
in Pentium class systems
This bus runs at the full motherboard speed typically between 66
MHz to 800 MHz .
To determine the transfer rate for the processor bus, you multiply
the data width by the clock speed of the bus.

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Logical Memory Organization

The main memory can be divided into different categories
known as Logical Memory Organization.

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Conventional Memory:
The first PC and PC/XT system used 8088/8086 processor
as the main processor.
These two chips had 20 bit address lines and the maximum
address this processor could access is 220 Bytes or 1 MB.
640 kb of this memory as the RAM memory area.
The 640kb used by DOS and other DOS based programs
such as WordStar, Lotus etc is called the conventional
memory or base memory or dos memory.
Today the addressing capability of the processor has
reached gigabytes, the 640kb limitation still exist to make
old software and hardware compatible with the new
generation software and hardware.

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UMA (upper memory area)

The memory area between 640KB and 1 MB is called as
Upper Memory Area or the High DOS Memory Area.
There are many empty locations in this area that is not
used by the ROMs, i.e. there is no physical memory
assigned to this area.
Big program cannot be stored here because this memory
may not be available continuously; it is available in small
chunks of different sized memory.
It is reserved for use by system devices.

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Extended memory (XMS)

Extended memory is the memory beyond the 1MB limit.
Any memory available after the 1 MB memory is called
extended memory.
It is available in the 286 and later processor based
computers only.
Addressing capacity of 286 processor is up to 16 MB and
386 processor can have up to 4gigabytes of extended
memory.
Not much useful for DOS users.
The memory manager takes care of the special HMA area
of the memory and allocates it to different software.
Extended Memory Specification (XMS ) is a standard
allows the real mode DOS program to use the extended
memory and HMA.

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HMA (high memory area)

HMA or High Memory Area is a 64 KB of memory at the
beginning of the extended memory.
It starts at the 1 MB limit i.e. at the location 1024KB and
goes up to 1088KB of memory.
It is memory from addresses 100000h to 10FFEFh.
It is special because it is the only part of extended memory
that can be used by the PC while operating in real mode.
It is used by DOS, to allow more conventional memory to
be preserved.
It can be accessed when the processor is in the real mode
which makes it different from the rest of extended
memory.

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Expanded Memory (EMS)

It is completely different type of memory specification
than Extended Memory.
This memory is mostly limited to the 286 based
computers.
On 286 and later machine because of the speed and
memory management capabilities the available extended
memory can be used as an expanded memory using
proper driver software.
The DOS (disk operating system--- control and manage the
files and program stored on disk) was not capable of
addressing memory beyond the 640 KB of RAM.
To solve this problem Lotus and Intel has developed a
method called expanded memory specification (EMS).
Later on the Microsoft also joined with the group.
This memory is also called as LIM memory (Lotus, Intel and
Microsoft), EMS memory.
EMS is not a part of the main memory, it is separately
installed into the system which can be accessed in a fixed
sized pages using a method called Bank switching.
In this method a small window in a main memory is used
to view the content of the EMS.

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This window is located in the main memory location

between 640 KB and 1024 KB i.e. in the upper memory
area.
The EMS memory is arranged in a block of 16 KB each, to
access this memory, 1 block of the EMS is copied into the
window in the main memory and after the processing it is
copied back to the EMS memory.

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Cache Memory
With each new model of the processor, the speed of the
processors is increases, but the speed of the memory chip has
not increased mush compared to the processor speed.
High speed RAM chips are also available in the market but they
are very costly to be used as the main memory.
After any memory read or write command is given. Once the
memory finished read or write operation then only processor can
continue with the next job.
This makes the CPU to wait for the result from memory.
Cache memory (Pronounced as cash) is a very small amount of
very high speed memory used in between the main memory
(RAM) and processor.
The information frequently required by the processor is kept in
the cache memory by a cache controller.
This cache controller always tries to make sure that the data
required by the processor in the next memory access is available
in the cache memory.
This improves speed of the computer very much because if the
required data is in the cache memory it is made available to the
CPU without any wait state.

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Principles of cache memory:

In general cache memory works by attempting to predict which data
the processor is going to need next, and loading that data before the
processor needs it, and saving the results after the processor is done
with it.
When the data required by the processor is found in the cache then it
is called a hit.
If the data required by the processor is not found in the cache, we
have a cache miss

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Levels of Cache/Types of Cache

Level 1 /L1 cache or Internal Cache :
L1: Level 1 cache is often called primary cache.
L1 cache, located within the processors core. L1 cache is also
sometimes called "internal" cache since it resides within the
processor.
It is usually the smallest cache.
It has a very low latency.
It is reachable by the processor without external bus activity and
therefore contributes to execution speedup and minimization of
bus traffic by the processor.
L1 cache operates at the same clock speed as the processor and is
usually of size 8KB.

CPU
Cache

MEMORY

L1 Cache

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Level 2/L2 Cache or External Cache:

L2: Level 2 cache is often called the secondary cache.
L2 cache stores much more data, usually coming from the L1
cache in multiples of the L1 cache size.
Previously L2 caches were external to the processor, but modern
processors have integrated it directly onchip.
Level 2 caches are also sometimes called "external" cache since it
resides outside the processor. (Even on Pentium Pros... it is on a
separate chip in the same package as the processor.)
The biggest advantage of moving the L2 cache onchip and
running it at full clock speed is that both the L1 and the L2 cache
can run in parallel and be accessed concurrently, reducing latency.
The most common size of L2 cache memory is 128 KB.

CACHE

CPU
L2 cache

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L3 Cache:
L3 cache is slowly replacing the L2 cache function and the extra
cache built into the motherboards between the CPU and the main
memory (old L2 cache definition) is now being called the L3 cache.
Some manufacturers have proprietary L3 cache designs already,
but most desktops do not offer this feature yet.
Micron has developed a chip set with 8MB of on-chip DRAM in the
north bridge chip that acts an L3 cache, but offering an L3 cache
as standard equipment is still a future aspect.
ADVANTAGES:
Enhances the speed of system or improving performance.
Reduces a traditional system bottleneck.
The access time is very small.
Instructions take less time to execute.
Data transfer gets quicker.
Cache memory is intelligent memory.
It holds current working set of code and data.
Reduces wait states.
DISADVANTAGES:
Size is really small
Cost is very high.

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BIOS (Basic Input Output System)

Basic Input Output System
The BIOS resides in a ROM chip, which is mounted on the
motherboard, usually in a socket so it is removable.
ROM BIOS store important program such as application program
and hardware such as floppy disk , hard disk, video adapter card
etc communicate with each other
BIOS contain POST program
Power on self test program check the motherboard and other
devices connected to the computer during the system power on
time.

Functions of BIOS
Give instructions for POST.
HOW to interact with critical component such as drives and
memory.
User can make adjustment to BIOS through a configuration
screen.
Flash memory card to hold BIOS information.
Flash memory- New type of EEPROM that can be erased and
reprogrammed using the normal operating voltage found inside
the PC.

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RAM
What is RAM ?
Random Access Memory.
RAM is volatile.
Broadly classified as
Static RAM.
Dynamic RAM.

Static RAM
Fast, has lower access time.
Typical access times 5-25 ns.
Expensive.
Cache memory is Static RAM.

Dynamic RAM
Slower, has higher access time than Static RAM.
Typical access times 60-120 ns.
Much cheaper than SRAM.
Main Memory is Dynamic RAM.

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SDRAM (Synchronous Dynamic Random Access Memory)

Features:- Replacement for DRAM.
All SDRAM chips for desktop PCs have 168 pins.
Speed of SDRAM is 100MHz and 133MHz.
Generally available in sizes 32 MB, 128Mb, 256Mb, 512Mb, 1 GB.
Operating Voltage 3.3 V.
Operation maximum temperature 85 c.
It prefetch 1 bit at a time.
Access time 6-12 ns.

DDR SDRAM (Double data rate)

184 pins
Transfer data on the up and down tick of clock cycle.
Speeds 100MHz,133 MHz,166MHz, 200MHz
Twice as fast as SDRAM
Operating voltage 2.5 V.
Architecture used source synchronous (2n/prefetch)
Max temp 85C
Prefetch 2 bit at a time.
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DDR2
240 pins
Speeds 400MHz, 533 MHz,667MHz and above.
Higher bandwidth.
Lower power 1.8v
Architecture used source synchronous
Max temp 950C
Prefetch 4 bit at a time.

DDR3
Double data rate 3 synchronous dynamic access memory used
for high speed storage of working data of a computer.
Ability to run its I/O bus at 4 times the speed memory cells
Speeds 800MHz,1066 MHz,1333MHz and 1600 MHz and above.
Lower power 1.5v
Prefetch 8 bit at a time.
Read and Write calibration.

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Advantages over DDR2

Higher bandwidth performance increase (up to 1600MHz)
Performance increase at low power
Enhanced low power features
Improved thermal design(cooler)

Disadvantages over DDR2

Cost is more

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915 Architecture

800 MHz system bus( FSB).

Supports Hyper-threading Technology
LGA 775 socket
Intel Graphics Media Accelerator 900
PCI Express bus architecture.
Dual channel DDR2 or DDR
Direct Media Interface.
Intel high definition Audio.
Intel Matrix Storage Technology
Four serial ATA ports
Ultra ATA/100
High speed USB 2.0 ports
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945G Express Chipset

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1066/800/533 Mhz system bus.

PCI Express interface
Intel Graphics Media Accelerator 950.
Intel High Definition Audio.
Intel Matrix Storage Technology.
Intel Active Management Technology
Serial ATA(SATA) 3 Gb/s
Dual Channel DDR2 memory support
Intel Flex Memory Technology.