front side bus


front side bus

(hardware)(FSB) The bus via which a processorcommunicates with its RAM and chipset; one half of theDual Independent Bus, the other half being the backside bus. The L2 cache is usually on the FSB, unless it is onthe same chip as the processor In PCI systems, the PCI bus runs at half the FSB speed.

Intel's Pentium 60 processor used a bus speed andprocessor speed of 60 MHz. All later processors have usedmultipliers to increase the internal clock speed whilemaintaining the same external clock speed, e.g. the Pentium 90 used a 1.5x multiplier. Modern Socket 370motherboards support multipliers from 4.5x to 8.0x, and FSBspeeds from 50 MHz to a proposed 83 MHz standard. Thesehigher speeds may cause problems with some PCI hardware.

Altering the FSB speed and the multiplier ratio are the twomain ways of overclocking processors.

Toms Hardware - The Bus Speed Guide.

Toms Hardware - The Overclocking Guide.