
564 THE x86 MICROPROCESSORS
17.3 | Chipset
A word commonly used when talking about motherboards is ‘chipset’. What exactly is it?
A chipset is a group of ICs working together to control the fl ow of data from/to and within the
motherboard. We can call them ‘controllers’ of the communication done therein. In Chapter 6,
we found that the 8086 needs various chips for buff ering, de-multiplexing, generating control
signals and so on. In Chapters 9, 10, and 11, more interfacing chips were discussed for handling
parallel data, serial data, DMA and so on. Each of these functions call for the use of separ-
ate chips which have to be programmed individually ...