front side bus

hardware (FSB) The bus via which a processor

communicates with its RAM and chipset; one half of the

Dual Independent Bus, the other half being the backsidebus. The L2 cache is usually on the FSB, unless it is on

the same chip as the processor [example?].

In PCI systems, the PCI bus runs at half the FSB speed.

Intel's Pentium 60 processor used a bus speed and

processor speed of 60 MHz. All later processors have used

multipliers to increase the internal clock speed while

maintaining the same external clock speed, e.g. the Pentium90 used a 1.5x multiplier. Modern Socket 370

motherboards support multipliers from 4.5x to 8.0x, and FSB

speeds from 50 MHz to a proposed 83 MHz standard. These

higher speeds may cause problems with some PCI hardware.

Altering the FSB speed and the multiplier ratio are the two

main ways of overclocking processors.

Toms Hardware - The Bus Speed Guide.

Toms Hardware - The Overclocking Guide.

(2002-02-21)