Whitney, Intel's 810 Chipset - Part I

The Accelerated Hub Architecture

Over are the good old days of 'North' and 'South' bridge, Intel 'invented' the new "Accelerated Hub Architecture"!! Now I cannot really say that I ever really understood the point of 'North' and 'South' bridges on motherboards, since it would be news to me that you adjust your motherboard according to North and South like Muslims praying towards Mecca. However, the question may be raised why Intel is changing this sweet little naming of the two chips that make a chipset to the 'HUB-architecture'. The main deal about this new architecture is that the two main chips are not connected using the PCI-bus, but a new dedicated bus that offers double the bandwidth of PCI. Thus each device, including the PCI bus can directly communicate with the CPU, the memory controller and, in case of the Intel810, with the graphics controller as well, using an eight bit wide bus clocked at 133 MHz at '2x-mode', which provides a bandwidth of 266 MB/s. The Intel820, well known under the name 'Camino' right now, will also use this hub-architecture.

In the below chart you can see the different architectures: