motherboard

Also known as mainboard, system board, planar board, logic board, mobo, computer motherboard, MB, main circuit board

alt=A view of a motherboard from an Xbox 360 E console from above.|thumb|The motherboard of a Xbox 360|Microsoft Xbox 360 E console. A motherboard, also known as a mainboard, system board, logic board, and informally mobo (see "Nomenclature" section), is the main printed circuit board (PCB) in general-purpose computers and other expandable systems. It holds and allows communication between many of the crucial electronic components of a system, such as the central processing unit (CPU) and memory, and provides connectors for other peripherals.

AI overview

A motherboard is the main circuit board inside computers and similar devices that holds the central processor, memory, and other crucial electronic components while allowing them to communicate with each other. It matters because it essentially serves as the backbone of a computer system, providing the connections and infrastructure that enable all the different parts to work together.

AI-generated from the Wikipedia summary — may contain errors.

~19 min read

Encyclopedic overview

14 sections

Contents

Nomenclature
History
Design
Form factor
CPU sockets
Integrated peripherals
Peripheral card slots
Temperature and reliability
Bootstrapping
IBM-compatible personal computers (PC)
SoCs and embedded systems
See also
References
External links

Unlike a backplane, a motherboard usually contains significant sub-systems, such as the CPU, the chipset's input/output and memory controllers, interface connectors, and other components integrated for general use.

Excerpted from Wikipedia’s “motherboard” article, available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 licence.