Overview
While the North Bridge focuses on memory control and the South Bridge focuses on "slower" capabilities of the motherboard, the West Bridge focuses on peripheral control. The new architectural modularization opens the potential for increased system performance. Being directly connected, peripheral control can be handled wholly and independently through a West Bridge's controller, leaving a processor offloaded and free to focus on other data intensive operations. Not only in increasing performance of the system via the processor, a West Bridge companion chip may itself serve directly as a peripheral accelerator.
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