How does a motherboard itself work to make a computer BE a computer?
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First, the motherboard provides clean, stable power to the various components, and gets that power to where it needs to be. Modern motherboards actually check the supplied power and turn off if the power is not to specification.
Second, the motherboard provides a clock signal that synchronizes operations.
Third, the motherboard provides a BIOS – this is some Read-Only Memory that provides the low level startup code that executes when the CPU is powered on. The BIOS runs a Power On Self Test (POST), identifies attached hardware, and then looks for bootable disks to load an available operating system.
Fourth, the motherboard provides some memory management hardware that handles RAM and Cache memory that is not on the CPU.
Fifth, the motherboard has data connections for hardware such as USB, SATA, and PCI. This includes access control to the data bus, synchronization of data transfer, and device to device data transfer.
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