Note the terminology that has become common for describing these chipsets. The
Intel 855GM is an example of what is commonly referred to as a northbridge chip
because it is directly connected to the processor’s high-speed front-side bus (FSB). An -
other companion chip that provides I/O and PCI bus connectivity is similarly referred
to as the southbridge chip because of its position in the architecture. The southbridge
chip (actually, an I/O controller) in these hardware architectures is responsible for pro -
viding interfaces such as those shown in Figure 3-1, including Ethernet, USB, IDE,
audio, keyboard, and mouse controllers.
On the Power Architecture side, the Tundra Tsi110 Host Bridge for Power Ar-
chitecture is an example of a chipset that supports the stand-alone Power Architec -
ture processors. The Tsi110 supports several interface functions for many common
stand-alone Power Architecture processors. The Tundra chip supports the Freescale
MPC74xx and the IBM PPC 750xx family of processors. These processors can use the
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