Every motherboard I’ve seen has at least three seperate chips besides the chipset- an audio chip, an gigabit ethernet chip, and a Super-IO. Is there some reason they don’t include them onboard the main chipset. I can maybe see the advantage of a seperate audio chip to reduce the noise, but why not ethernet at least? When was the last time there was a motherboard without it?
“Super I/O” chips are going away with the sunset of legacy ports; with so little demand for floppy drives, PS/2 mice and keyboards, serial/parallel ports, and with BIOS going away in favor of EFI, it’s better just to delete the chip than waste die area integrating it into the I/O hub.
as far as ethernet goes, I can only take a WAG so I’ll defer to anyone who might actually know the answer.