Chipsets

Back in the DSL days of the 2000's there used to be a North Bridge and South Bridge, which interacted well together, unlike the US during the early 1860's.

It eventullay became embdeed into the CPU directly, and now it's just Chipsets on the Motherboard individuals are concerned with

And this matters why

Each Chipset has different sets of features usually revolving around PCIE generation, # of PCIE lanes, USB #'s, Sata Controllers, Thunderbolt Support, # of memory channels, overlcoking capabilities, BIOS features, etc.

For most computer users, this is not important, but for designing systems, this can be extremely important in Niche situations or to get the most out of your hardware.