Microbenchmarking Chipsets for Giggles

Motherboard chipsets have taken on fewer and fewer performance critical functions over time. In the Athlon 64 era, integrated memory controllers took the chipset out of the DRAM access path. In the early 2010s, CPUs like Intel’s Sandy Bridge brought PCIe lanes onto the CPU, letting it interface with a GPU without chipset involvement. Chipsets today still host a lot of important IO capabilities, but they’ve become a footnote in the performance equation. Benchmarking a chipset won’t be useful, but...