The reason is flexibility, the board manufacturer can decide how many PCIe lanes to send where, how many USB ports there’s going to be etc. Modern mainboards are a power delivery system and IO backplane.
Yeah but then you can’t switch out the chipset without having a different CPU skew and probably also socket because changing IO without changing up pins doesn’t sound like a good idea. People would barely notice the additional sockets with Intel but we don’t want to take Intel as a benchmark there, do we.
My guess would be partially because there are fewer possible interfaces, and they’re directly connecting the CPU to a separate Ethernet/WiFi MAC, USB hub controller, and audio DSP rather than having a separate chipset arbitrating who’s talking to the CPU and doing some of those functions?
my understanding, from the block diagrams they release, is that these io functions are simply integrated into the cpu. in a way that could probably be implemented in desktops too.
I can’t say for all of them, I just knew that e.g. the z790 chipset still ran the ethernet phy, audio dsp, SPI, their version of TrustZone, etc through the chipset
laptops all have pretty much an x86 soc. separation between cpu and chipset nowadays happens only on desktops for some reason.
The reason is flexibility, the board manufacturer can decide how many PCIe lanes to send where, how many USB ports there’s going to be etc. Modern mainboards are a power delivery system and IO backplane.
this makes sense but can’t it be done with integrated chipsets too?
Yeah but then you can’t switch out the chipset without having a different CPU skew and probably also socket because changing IO without changing up pins doesn’t sound like a good idea. People would barely notice the additional sockets with Intel but we don’t want to take Intel as a benchmark there, do we.
I haven’t looked that closely at laptop CPUs
My guess would be partially because there are fewer possible interfaces, and they’re directly connecting the CPU to a separate Ethernet/WiFi MAC, USB hub controller, and audio DSP rather than having a separate chipset arbitrating who’s talking to the CPU and doing some of those functions?
my understanding, from the block diagrams they release, is that these io functions are simply integrated into the cpu. in a way that could probably be implemented in desktops too.
I can’t say for all of them, I just knew that e.g. the z790 chipset still ran the ethernet phy, audio dsp, SPI, their version of TrustZone, etc through the chipset
https://www.funkykit.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/intel-z790-chipset-diagram.jpg
If you have the block diagrams for the laptop ones, I’d be curious