One feature pertains to a modular design of a motherboard for a computer system. The mother board is disaggregated into a CPU board and an IO board. The CPU board contains at least one CPU, the associated memory subsystem and the voltage regulator module. The integrated IO ports escape to a high speed connector mating with its counterpart on an IO board which contains all peripheral devices including system logic not part of the CPU. In a multi-socket configuration the CPUs are on the CPU board and the processor interconnects are routed directly in a point to point manner.