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Jim on Engineering | What’s happening on a motherboard?

In this unique episode of Jim on Engineering, Jim Shaw, Alan High, Will Byers, and Mike Steffen discuss what is happening on a motherboard, in terms of chips and functionality that they provide. They will answer the question: How do these chips work together to create the server class motherboard that we apply to various applications today?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

First up: the central processing unit (CPU)

  • An integrated circuit that is the primary processing component in a computer.
  • High speed, complex computation
  • High speed interfaces:
    • PCIe
    • NVMe
    • DDR (Memory)
    • DMI, UPI, HyperTransport, Infinity Fabric
  • Hardware virtualization support (Intel VT, AMD-V)
  • Crypto acceleration (AES-NI)
  • Specific security features:
    • Intel SGX
    • BIOS Guard
    • BOOT Guard
    • Total memory encryption