> I learned about computer architecture in the days in which the "northbridge" and "southbridge" were the major active components of the system bus... but few c

> I learned about computer architecture in the days in which the "northbridge" and "southbridge" were the major active components of the system bus... but few computers today have discrete north and south bridges (or front-side and back-side buses for that matter), the functions of the two having been integrated into various combinations of the processor die and a large, monolithic motherboard chipset like the platform controller hub (PCH), with the functions of essentially all motherboard components put into one IC. Seems somewhat in flux again though, albeit slightly different form! AMD's been doing chiplets for a while now, with a io die that quite strongly resembles a Northridge in many ways. It sits between cpu, ram, and the rest of the system. Conceptually it seems very similar to a Northridge. But it so happens to be a dedicated die on the multi-chip-module, rather than be on the motherboard. The southbridge never really left, and I'm not sure if there's any roles it really gave up either... i've thought of it as the platform control hub or io expander for a long time. But agreed that many embedded chips tend to eskew this pch & just combine all functionally on the main chip, albeit that might be comprised of chiplets. We've gone to finer levels of integration! But things are much the same.