Northbridge (computing)

[3] The trend for integrated northbridges began near the end of the 2000s – for example, the Nvidia GeForce 320M GPU in the 2010 MacBook Air was a northbridge/southbridge/GPU combo chip.

Since the 2010s, die shrink and improved transistor density have allowed for increasing chipset integration, and the functions performed by northbridges are now often incorporated into other components such as southbridges or CPUs themselves.

The northbridge typically handles communications among the CPU, in some cases RAM, and PCI Express (or AGP) video cards, and the southbridge.

The CPU would be connected to the chipset via a fast bridge (the northbridge) located north of other system devices as drawn.

The northbridge would then be connected to the rest of the chipset via a slow bridge (the southbridge) located south of other system devices as drawn.

The overall trend in processor design has been to integrate more functions onto fewer components, which decreases overall motherboard cost and improves performance.

Some northbridge chips have supported dual processors, for example Intel's 5000X memory controller used in the original Mac Pro from 2006.

AMD Accelerated Processing Unit processors feature full integration of northbridge functions onto the CPU chip or package, along with processor cores, memory controller, high speed PCI Express interface (usually for graphics card), and integrated graphics processing unit (iGPU).