What is the purpose of the northbridge?

Answer 1

It depends on the type of CPU used. Originally, the northbridge chip served as a memory controller, AGP bus controller, and system bus. It interfaced with the CPU, the RAM, and the southbridge chip. The southbridge connected to about everything else. But most of the northbridge functions are now done by the CPU in many computers. The memory controller and sometimes even graphics are in the CPU these days.

Answer 2

An educated guess of mine would be that the names are derived from the fact that the north bridge is the one that has data pass through it first, acting like a bridge, which then passes through the south bridge. Typically, when your computer is standing upright, the north bridge will be on top and the south bridge will be below and the data goes from the top to the bottom. This may not be true all of the time, but for the most part it is.

Answer 3

to direct traffic to and from cpu, memory,cache 2 , pci and agp ports