What Is a Motherboard Chipset?

A motherboard chipset is the support chip that sits beside the processor and connects it to most of the board’s other features: USB ports, SATA drives, extra PCIe slots and M.2 sockets, network controllers and audio. Intel calls it the Platform Controller Hub (PCH).

Modern processors handle memory, graphics and the fastest PCIe lanes themselves, and the chipset adds the rest of the board’s connections. It decides how many ports and slots a board can offer, which processors it accepts, and which platform features, such as remote management or RAID, are available. Two boards with the same processor socket but different chipsets can therefore look and behave very differently.

Older PCs used two chips. The northbridge handled the fast connections to memory and graphics, and the southbridge handled slower I/O such as USB, drives and audio. Around 2008 to 2010, Intel and AMD moved the memory controller and graphics link into the processor itself, and the northbridge disappeared. What remained of the southbridge became today’s single chipset.

The processor and chipset are joined by a dedicated link: Intel’s Direct Media Interface (DMI), or a set of PCIe lanes on AMD platforms. Everything behind the chipset shares that link, which is why the fastest devices, such as a GPU or the main NVMe drive, are wired straight to the processor instead.

The split varies slightly by generation, but on a current Intel desktop or embedded board it typically looks like this.

This is why a board’s specification sheet lists some ports as coming from the CPU and others from the chipset. For more on how the board is laid out around both, see our explainer on what a motherboard is.

The chipset shapes what a board can connect to long after the processor is chosen.

Each chipset family is tied to a processor socket, so the chipset name tells you which processors a board can take.

Industrial and embedded boards use embedded chipsets, often marked with an E, such as the Q670E, R680E and H610E. They are electrically the same family as their desktop equivalents, but are supported for longer and backed by longer availability commitments. Q-series chipsets include business features such as vPro, R-series parts suit high-performance embedded designs, and H-series parts suit cost-sensitive boards with fewer ports. W-series chipsets, such as the W880, support workstation processors and ECC memory.

Many low-power processors have no separate chipset at all. Intel Processor N, Atom and Elkhart Lake chips, AMD Ryzen Embedded and Arm processors are systems-on-chip, with the chipset functions built into the same package. Boards built on them are simpler and use less power, but offer fewer expansion lanes.

Our white paper on choosing an embedded motherboard or single board computer covers the wider decision, and our industrial motherboards include boards on Q670E, R680E and W880 chipsets. Full-size industrial ATX and Micro-ATX motherboards make the most of the chipset’s expansion lanes.

We supply industrial motherboards and the systems built on them with the memory, storage, drivers and operating system image installed as standard, and help choose a chipset with the ports, lanes and lifecycle the product needs.