the chipset

In personal computers a chipset is a group of integrated circuits that together perform a particular function. System purchasers generally think in terms of the processor itself (such as a Pentium III, Pentium IV, or competitive chips from AMD or Cyrix). However they are really buying a system chipset that includes the microprocessor itself and often a memory cache (which may be part of the microprocessor or a separate chip— see cache) as well as the chips that control the memory bus (which connects the processor to the main memory on the motherboard.) The overall performance of the system depends not just on the processor’s architecture (including data width, instruction set, and use of instruction pipelines) but also on the type and size of the cache memory, the memory bus (RDRAM or “Rambus” and SDRAM) and the speed with which the processor can move data to and from memory.