Motherboard

This is the main circuit board of the PC. It contains all the basic, core components of the
computer. It usually contains:

 the CPU, which plugs into a socket designed for a particular CPU's pin arrangement.
Because a motherboard has sockets that can only accept certain types of CPU, it is
important to make sure when upgrading your CPU that your motherboard can accept it.

 memory chips - these hold data and programs that the CPU is currently using.

 Input/output ports ("I/O") such as connectors that hard disk drives, floppy disk drives
and CD-ROM drives plug in to, serial port sockets, parallel port sockets and USB port
sockets.

 BIOS chips (Basic Input Output System) - the BIOS chips are PROM (Programmable
Read Only Memory) chips that contain the most basic information that a computer
needs to start up and operate. The BIOS contains bootup information, details of what
sort of CPU is installed, what hard disks are available, how the motherboard should
behave etc. More details below.

 Real time Clock (RTC) so the computer knows the time and date. The RTC needs a
battery to keep the clock running when the computer's power is turned off.

 Chips to control basic devices such as hard disks, floppy disks, serial/parallel ports etc.
These basic chips are sometimes called the "chip set".

 Some motherboards, especially laptop motherboards, have built-in graphics chips,

sound chips and modem chips so expansion cards are not needed. Unfortunately, this
also means laptops can be very hard to upgrade because these chips are usually
impossible to remove and replace. An example of "integrated peripherals" is AC '97
Audio. It combines a low-cost audio codec (compressor/decompressor) integrated
circuit (IC) with a small portion of the core chipset's processing power to form a
complete PC audio subsystem. Soft audio processing consumes minimal CPU
overhead and does away with the need for a separate PCI audio controller (e.g.
Soundblaster card). The result is reduced motherboard space and overall system cost.
Building in AC '97 costs a manufacturer about $2, compared to almost $100 for a PCI
sound card.

 While motherboards have been getting smaller and smaller, computer cases seem to be
getting bigger because the new computers generate more and more heat and need lots
of empty space to ventilate themselves.

 
How motherboards work

 
A modern motherboard, dominated by huge cooling fans and heat sinks, has very few
individual chips and is physically small.
 An old Commodore 128 motherboard. Note the much larger number of chips, lack of
expansion slots and cooling devices, and wide open spaces!
 

Power supply
The power supply provides the electricity needed by the motherboard and different
components in the computer. It usually provides a series of power leads carrying 12 volts or 5
volts. A special lead feeds the motherboard and other leads power the disk drives. The power
supply is a sealed cube about 12cm on each side and has a fan in it to cool itself and the
computer case down.

How power supplies work

How Uninterruptible Power Supplies (UPS) work

 
Bus
There are various buses in a PC - expansion bus, expansion slots, slots, I/O bus, I/O system, or
channel bus.

Subsystems in a PC communicate to each other via buses (basically, a set of wires). Buses
follow a particular set of standard rules to allow compatibility with the numerous subsystems.
Every expansion card plugged into a computer's expansion slot needs to communicate with the
CPU. To make this easier, there is a communication path that runs from the CPU to the
expansion slots so the CPU and the expansion cards can keep in touch. This is the bus. The
speed at which the bus can carry data is a key factor in a computer's overall performance, and
this speed has been increasing rapidly recently.

Each bus in a PC has a speed (measured in megahertz) and a data transfer rate. In 1996 and
1997, the PC industry standardized around the 66 MHz Front Side Bus. A 100 MHz Front
Side Bus came in 1998, then 133 MHz in 2000. The Pentium 4 introduced a 400 MHz Front
Side Bus in late 2000.

ISA: The original bus type in the first IBM PCs was ISA. It was narrow (16 bit) and slow and
ISA expansion slots are not often found on motherboards today.

The EISA (Extended Industry Standard Architecture) bus is a 32-bit bus introduced in 1989. It
was produced to solve the problems of the ISA bus while maintaining compatibility with ISA
plug-in cards (an old ISA card could be plugged into an EISA slot.)

Micro Channel (a 32 bit proprietary bus designed by IBM, which did not become very
popular) and EISA had higher performance and advanced features over ISA. Since then,
however, both have been replaced by PCI and PCI-X.

High-speed memory local buses were first introduced in 1985. The slow data transfer rate of
the ISA bus required processors to go into wait states (i.e. it would twiddle its thumbs while
waiting for data to arrive from memory chips) when requesting reads or writes to or from main
memory. The memory local bus helped to solve this problem. All PCs use a memory local bus
today.

PCI enhances performance for I/O-intensive operations such as storage and communication
devices in servers, graphics, and video in desktops and notebooks. PCI offers multiple
expansion slots. PCI is an industry standard. A PCI system could have peripherals (disk
controller, LAN controller) on the systemboard and/or have open slots or connectors so
whether the peripheral is on the motherboard or in an expansion slot, it uses the PCI command
set to transfer data.

AGP is a special slot for high speed graphics cards; it has a direct line to the CPU.

PCI Express - even faster, a family of slots for ultra-high speed expansion cards.

Universal Serial Bus (USB) allows the addition of a new device to a PC by plugging it into
the back of the machine or daisy-chaining it from another device on the bus. The device is
immediately available for use (no rebooting required) and often does not need a device driver
to be installed (depending on the operating system being used.

USB 1.1 allowed communication speeds of 12 Megabits per second and the enhanced USB 2.0
carries data at 360 to 480 Mbps. All cables use four wires; the distance between two devices
can be up to five meters.

A big advantage of USB devices, apart from their much greater speed, is that USB devices
configure themselves automatically: gone are the days when you had to fiddle with IRQ
settings, DMA channels, and I/O addresses to make a gadget work.

Another advantage of USB is that it is a standard port and can support just about any type of
device, including keyboards, mice, serial peripherals (e.g. modems), printers, audio
input/output, joysticks, digital cameras, scanners, external hard disks and CD burners. Soon,
the collection of space-consuming and costly dedicated ports for keyboards, printers, mice,
modems etc will disappear and replaced by USB. USB can be built into most chipsets for
about $1. The other advantage is that you can mix and match devices as much as you like. In
the old days, if you had a parallel port scanner and a printer, they had to share the single
printer port (and neither of them would work properly for long.)

If you have several USB devices, it is best to use a USB hub. This is a little box that splits a
single USB port into 4 or more ports.

FireWire - a.k.a. IEEE 1394 provides a standardized high-speed serial bus to link computer
and consumer peripherals to PCs through a common, high-speed serial port. It can connect
1394-compatible peripherals like disks, CD-ROMs, printers, and scanners, as well as digital
consumer electronic products such as digital cameras, camcorders, stereo systems, set top
boxes, HDTVs, DVD players, and speakers. IEEE 1394b - the next generation Firewire -
supports 800 Mbps to 3.2 Gbps. Over plastic fiber-optic cable or Category 5 copper wire,
1394b networks can span 100 meters. Over glass fiber, 1394b can transmit over several
kilometers. A 1394 cable consists of six wires. Four of the six shielded wires are used for data
and control signals; the other two carry power.

Firewire seems to have lost out to USB, but is still popular in particular situations, such as
linking video cameras to computers.

How the bus works

 
Expansion slots:
These are sockets that expansion cards like network cards, sound cards, graphics cards can be
plugged into. There have been various types of slots over the years to cater for increasingly
complex expansion cards. The earliest cards were ISA, then came EISA, then PCI and AGP
(which have special high-priority access to the CPU - AGP is used by fast graphic cards). All
expansions slots connect to a bus so data can travel between subsystems and the CPU.

PCI express slots - x4, x16 and x1 slots, as well as a standard 32-bit PCI slot.

 
Cache
Cache is a storage place (buffer or bucket) that exists between two subsystems in order for
data to be accessed more quickly to increase performance. Performance is increased because
the cache subsystem usually has faster access technology and does not have to cross an
additional bus. Cache is typically used for reads, but it is increasingly being used for writes as
well. For example, getting information to the processor from the disk involves up to five cache
locations:
1. L1 cache in the processor (memory cache)
2. L2 cache (memory cache)
3. Software disk cache (in main memory)
4. Hardware disk cache (common on SCSI controllers; EIDE usually uses only a FIFO buffer)
5. Disk buffer

For reads, one subsystem will usually request more data than what is immediately needed, and
that excess data is stored in the cache(s). During the next read, the cache(s) are searched for
the requested data, and if it is found, a read to the subsystem beyond the cache is not
necessary.

 
Memory
RAM (Random Access Memory): Chips that store data and programs. RAM loses its
memory when power is turned off, which means you will need to save your data and
information to a permanent medium (like hard disk) before the power goes off. RAM is rated
by its density and speed of retrieval.

ROM: Read-Only Memory (and PROM, EPROM, EEPROM, Flash RAM) are different to
RAM mainly because they can keep their memory after the power goes off. Once ROM has
had its data burned into it, it can never be changed, but the other variants allow the memory
contents to be erased and replaced with new data. Devices such as modems, that contain
programming that may need to be updated every so often, use EEPROM rather than ROM.
Flash RAM is used for data that is often changed, such as USB memory keys. USB memory
keys are small devices that plug into a USB port and appear as large removeable disk drives -
in 2002 you can get ones that can store 128 megabytes, and soon there will be 1 Gigabyte
versions. You can copy files to them as if they were a disk, remove the memory key and carry
the data away on your key chain! They are exceptionally useful little beasties. The death of the
floppy disk is imminent.

The "Nexdisk" by Jungsoft: its Flash RAM can hold 128M.

 Above: RAM chips packaged in SIMMS (Single Inline Memory Modules)

Above: Looking like a harmonica, big, fast DDR2 SDRAM (double-data-rate two
synchronous dynamic random access memory)

How memory works

How FLASH memory works

How RAM works

How the BIOS works

How ROM works

 
BIOS
The Basic Input/Output System (BIOS) is a set of program instructions that provide startup
information for a computer, and acts as a go-between between an operating system and the
hardware in a computer. The BIOS is usually located in non-volatile memory on the
motherboard. When a PC is started, the BIOS runs a power-on self-test (POST). It then tests
the system and prepares the computer for operation by searching for other BIOSs on
expansion boards (e.g. video card, hard disk controller) and remembering where they are, so
the computer can use the plug-in devices later. It then loads the operating system and passes
control to it.
Chipsets
Chipsets are physical hardware chips (circuitry) that control the information flow between
subsystems. The chipset of a system is generally as important as the processor type in that the
chipset determines the features and performance of a system.Chipsets are associated with
specific processors, and new chipsets are continually released that provide new features and
performance enhancements to support new CPUs.