Front-side bus

A front-side bus (FSB) was a computer communication interface (bus) often used in Intel-chip-based computers during the 1990s and 2000s. The competing EV6 bus served the same function for AMD CPUs. Both typically carry data between the central processing unit (CPU) and a memory controller hub, known as the northbridge.

Depending on the implementation, some computers may also have a back-side bus that connects the CPU to the cache. This bus and the cache connected to it are faster than accessing the system memory (or RAM) via the front-side bus. The speed of the front side bus is often used as an important measure of the performance of a computer.

The original front-side bus architecture has been replaced by HyperTransport, Intel QuickPath Interconnect or Direct Media Interface in modern volume CPUs.

The term came into use by Intel Corporation about the time the Pentium Pro and Pentium II products were announced, in the 1990s.

"Front side" refers to the external interface from the processor to the rest of the computer system, as opposed to the back side, where the back-side bus connects the cache (and potentially other CPUs).

An FSB is mostly used on PC-related motherboards (including personal computers and servers), seldom with the data and address buses used in embedded systems and similar small computers. This design represented a performance improvement over the single system bus designs of the previous decades, but sometimes is still called the "system bus".

Front-side buses usually connect the CPU and the rest of the hardware via a chipset, which Intel implemented as a northbridge and a southbridge. Other buses like the Peripheral Component Interconnect (PCI), Accelerated Graphics Port (AGP), and memory buses all connect to the chipset in order for data to flow between the connected devices. These secondary system buses usually run at speeds derived from the front-side bus clock, but are not necessarily synchronized to it.

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