If you’re not an expert in computer hardware, it can be hard to understand the difference between a chipset and CPU.
A lot of people think that they are one and the same thing, but this isn’t true. The chipset is just the motherboard on which all of your components may be installed and connected. It’s what enables your CPU to communicate with other components like RAM or graphics cards.
In this blog post, we will explore the difference between a chipset and a CPU.
The chipset is the motherboard of a phone and computer or, in other words, the mother board on which all of the components may be installed and connected. The chipset enables the CPU to communicate with other components of the computer.
A CPU consists of one central processing unit (CPU) chip which contains all of the computing power for executing instructions from an operating system as well as running any programs that have been loaded into memory by those instructions.
We will explore how they differ in greater detail below:
What is a Chipset?
A chipset is a set of computer chips that are designed to work together closely in order to allow communication with other chipsets or devices.
The term “chipset” may be traced back to the original IBM PC design where it described an expansion board which took the place of several integrated circuits (ICs) and other components. This board was responsible for controlling all input/output functions as well as handling data communications between the CPU and memory, and among peripheral devices such as disk drives, monitor, keyboard, printer etc.
Today’s motherboards contain multiple chipsets for coordinating low-level activities among the various motherboard components including both hardware and software interactions with CPUs, RAM, hard disk drives etc. For instance, some chipsets are designed to handle data transfer between the CPU and RAM while others are responsible for controlling peripheral devices.
What is a CPU?
When it comes to CPUs, modern processors contain two or more execution units that perform arithmetic/logical operations at high speed. These execution units are known as “cores”.
For example, the Intel i7-920 contains four cores while the Intel Xeon E5-2690 has 10. The most common types of cores in use today include: single-, dual-, triple- and quad-. So when we talk about a computer having a 2 GHz 8 core processor (CPU), this essentially means that every second, the CPU can complete eight billion arithmetic/logical operations which is equivalent to 2GHz x 8 cores = 16,000 MIPS or 16 Giga-FLOPS.
When a CPU is executing instructions from an operating system, it will often have to wait for software and other devices to generate data which the execution unit(s) can use in their computations.
In other words, when a program is running on a computer that contains a 2 GHz 8 core processor (CPU), each of the cores will only be able to operate at a maximum speed of 2GHz x 1 core = 2GHz until data is ready for them to process, at which point they would then be able to run at full speed again.
Now this brings us back to chipset because since CPUs rely on them heavily during processing periods, if there was no chipset present or if one of the chipsets was faulty, then this would cause a bottleneck because it would limit the performance of all cores.
In other words, if the CPU has one 2 GHz 8 core processor (CPU) and there were two chipsets present but one of them was faulty, then during processing periods when data is required by all eight cores simultaneously, only four cores would be able to operate at their maximum speed while the other four cores would have to wait until data from another chipset becomes ready for use in computations.
