What is a chip set

What is a chip set?

Answer:

When we speak about busses and system boards, we are also speaking about chip sets. The
chip sets are a bunch of intelligent controller chips, which are on any system board. They are
closely tied to the CPU, in that they control the busses around the CPU. Without the chip sets,
neither RAM or I/O busses could function together with the CPU.

New technologies - new chip set

Therefore, the chip sets are quite central components on the system boards. When new
technological features are introduced (and this happens continuously) they are often
accompanied by new chip sets. The new chip sets often enable:
* Higher speed on one or more busses
* Utilization of new facilities (new RAM types, new busses, improved EIDE, etc.)
There are several suppliers of Pentium chip sets:
*Intel
*SIS
* Opti
* Via
* AMD

Intel has hitherto been the leader in supplying chip sets to the Pentium system board.
Therefore, let us just mention their chip sets, which have astronomical names.
The Neptune chip set (82434NX) was introduced in June 1994. It replaced the Mercury set
(82434LX). In both chip sets, there were problems with the PCI bus. In January 1995 Intel
introduced the first Triton , where everything worked. This chip set supports some new
features: it supports EDO RAM, and it offers bus master integrated EIDE control and NSP
(Native Signal Processing - one of the many new creations, which was soon forgotten).