How do motherboards work?
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Motherboards are interface adapters that take the CPU chip interface signals and adapt them to match the memory module interface signals, the bus card interface signals, and other interfaces parts for video, USB, or other I/O ports.
ELI5: A Motherboard is like a grocery store. We know there is a meat department, a bakery, we know there is a section where all the milk and cheese are and a warehouse portion where goods may be stored. There are doors on the outside of the building like the receiving dock, front entrance for customers, or emergency exits. There are also the aisles of the store. All of these things work together to make it ‘A Grocery Store’, but it’s really many different smaller markets all in one building. Dry goods, fresh goods, some staff helping stock the shelves and some staff helping ring in purchases from customers. The motherboard ensures those different departments know how to talk to each other, because sometimes the guy working in the bakery speaks a different language than the lady at the dairy section. The motherboard speaks all these languages, and lets them all work well together. The motherboard itself uses a ‘Store Manager’ called a ‘Chipset’ that knows all the languages of the departments.
A motherboard is like a room full of interpreters, some are standing next to intercom windows, some are crowded near the center. In the center, there’s one person that only speaks one language, the processor, it makes decisions about the information that comes and goes.
Outside the room are people that want to talk to each other but don’t speak any of the same languages so they stand next to a window of the interpreter who does. (Hard drive, monitor, desktop speakers, keyboard and mouse, etc.)
The interpreters are specialized to know the language of their window and a similar but more common language. The person behind them knows that sort-of common language and one that’s even more common. Behind them is someone who knows the common one and the processor language, and behind them then processor.(sometimes there’s a handful of interpreters, sometimes only a couple)
If you want to play a song, the processor makes the call and the line of interpreters leading toward the hard drive window relay the message until it’s at the window in hard-drive language.
The hard-drive person sings the song to their interpreter and it gets relayed back toward the processor.
While that was happening, the processor went ahead and sent a message toward the desktop speaker to expect a song.
The song gets related toward the processor but all the interpreters in that circle speak processor language so the processor just gives a nod to the interpreter along the route to the desktop speaker and they push it along, converting the language to stereo, analogue, voltage, whatever it needs to be for the speaker to use.
How it works is through all those little microchips and components. Some are more directly interpreting data in a way that’s more understandable to the next in line like the visualization, some are there to act as shortcuts to other components, like having an interpreter that knows two of the unique languages. Some are there to organize the effort, to keep an eye on which windows are occupied and make sure everyone is getting their turn. Each of their jobs is relatively simple and the structure of the microchips makes the process practically automatic, but together they make an enormous extremely complex and versatile device for connecting everything to everything.
A modern computer needs certain things to operate. It needs a source of stable electricity. It needs short-term memory (a place to quickly save and recall numbers while powered on) and long-term storage. It needs to have ports to send & receive numbers to & from input & output devices, including keyboards, mice, audio, video, and networking hardware. It also needs something which can process lists of instructions to move numbers around between all these components, do math, wait for input, and generate output, all in time with a metronome-like pace-setter. Also nice to have: a battery-powered clock so it doesn’t lose track of time, and additional components to help it solve complex math problems quickly. It usually also needs some radiator-like devices and possibly fans to dissipate the enormous amount of heat that is generated by some of these components.
The motherboard is a physical, flat piece of plastic with all those things mounted on it, connected to each other via wire-like conductive paths. You connect it to power, connect all the input/output devices, and make sure it’s got short-term memory and long-term storage, and voilà, you have a computer.
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