I am not familiar with the term north pole or south pole in relation to a computer motherboard, and think it likely that the question refers to the north bridge and south bridge instead.
The north and south bridges are parts of the chipset, which connects the CPU with memory, other direct main bus users (such as advanced graphics cards), and peripheral components.
The north bridge provides a bus arbitration service between high performance components (CPU, memory, GPU), while the southbridge provides connectivity to other busses, such as the USB, PCI or IDE bus. In a graphical arrangement with the lesser peripheral components at the bottom of a drawing and the CPU on drawn on top, the northbridge is directly connected to the CPU and, therefore, resides "in the north." The southbridge itself connects to the northbridge, and in the drawing resides "further south."
Northbridge and southbridge are conceptual ideas, and may not be implemented as dedicated chips in modern chipsets.
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