Motherboard Chipsets and the Memory Map

Tuesday, April 12, 2011

I came across two excellent articles recently and am posting a short commentary on them here and at How Computers Boot Up .

This article is probably a little harder to digest than the boot-up article, but still and all it may be of interest to you, as much as when the salesman pops the hood of your new car and you go “Ok. Boring!”.

When you look at the diagram, you can think of the arrow-lines as wires connecting the bits and pieces.

“ … the CPU doesn’t really know anything about what it’s connected to.” Is ever so true. It’s just as true of computers. I spend hours listening to clients talk about their data (and they need to describe it to me so I can build a process), but I know that the computer doesn’t have a clue about dollars or names or temperatures – it’s just data, strings of characters or chunks of numbers. And in the end, of course, 1s and 0s, but not even that, it is plus-or-minus voltages, when you come down to it.

And even then the computer doesn’t understand anything. It’s just a wired-together collection of transistors, right?

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