How do motherboards work?

Question

How do motherboards work?

In: 2

Answer 1

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.