Silicon Integrated Systems, the number two Taiwanese chipset designer, announced this week that its recently rolled-out SiS648FX chipset has been adopted by numerous mainboard producers, including the so-called Big Four.

According to the statement, among many mainboard manufacturers adopting the SiS648FX chipset, AOpen, ASUS, Gigabyte, and MSI have entered into the stage of mass production, while Acorp’s 4S648FXN, Biostar’s P4SSDV, DFI’s 648FX-AL and ECS’s L4S8A/FX will be launched into the distribution channel of the market in June.

SiS648FX core-logic supports processors with 400, 533 and 800MHz Quad Pumped Bus, and the Hyper-Threading technology, including the forthcoming Prescott CPUs. Like all modern chipsets, the 648FX provides PC3200 DDR SDRAM and AGP 8x features. SiS648FX is paired with SiS963L South Bridge, which offers USB 2.0/1.1, 2 ATA-133/100/66/33 IDE channels, 6-channel AC’97 audio, 10/100Mb/s Ethernet, Home PNA2.0 and so on.

The latest Socket 478 chipset from SiS is not as fast as dual-channel DDR SDRAM-supporting products and will mostly compete with inexpensive i845-based mainboards with 800MHz QPB and single-channel memory support. For those, who want to use a SiS core-logic with 800MHz QPB chips and dual-channel memory, I would recommend to wait for SiS655FX chipset.