Speed busing

[approdis]

Hello, I am studying for my comp tia hardware essentials course. I got into some stumped questions while reading about the CPU's, and memory.

Does the memory bus have to run on the same speed as the cpu? So what I am asking is the speed of data that is comming in and out of the north bridge that makes it's routes to cache, memory, the drives and such. Are they all flowing at the same speed rate?

and is the data rate of the South bridge flowing at the same speed as the north bridge?

Thanks,
Chris

 

[Indigo]

It depends on the chip and the motherboard. For AMD you deal with HyperTransport, which is usually abbreviated HTT, and with Intel, it's their QPI or Quick Path Interface/Interconnect (depending on who you ask).

Data that flows in a processor's L1 and L2 cache is (these days) tied to the speed of the processor, whereas L3 is sometimes the same speed as the processor (both Intel and AMD's latest chips support on-die L3 cache, which does run at full chip speed)

Data rates to RAM are tied to either the QPI or HTT busses.

The data rate of the south bridge depends on the path being used as well.