Talk:Southbridge (computing)

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It would be interesting to hear the originas of the terminology "Northbridge" and "Southbridge". I tried googling around for this info ans so far didn't find anything.

Bridges in computing connect different systems at a low level. North and south probably comes from their relative position in the systems hierarchy.

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Another question: What kind of bus connects the north and south bridge commonly? Are there proprietary interconnects or just a PCI bus, thus limiting everything behind the northbridge to 133MB/s?

That's dependent on which chipset you're talking about. Some chipsets did use the standard PCI bus which allowed for some interesting mix-n-match motherboards. But that created a bottle neck on the already saturated PCI bus, AFAIK all modern chipsets are paired due to the proprietary interconnects.

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It would be nice to have a diagram here and on the Northbridge article to illustrate the relationships between Northbridge, Southbridge, CPU, memory, devices, etc.

[edit] USB Southbridge

Does this mean that the USB in southbridge is faster than the USB in PCI because the bus that the USB in the southbridge uses the 'proprietary bus' and not the PCI bus?

This is faster...

         USB --> Southbridge --> Proprietary Bus --> Northbridge --> CPU

than this

         USB --> PCI --> Southbridge --> Proprietary Bus --> Northbridge --> CPU

Don't cite me as an expert on this one, but I think it's entirely dependent on how the Southbridge implements the USB controller.