The world’s third largest maker of chipsets for personal computers – Silicon Integrated Systems – today unveiled its yet another South Bridge with support for PCI Express x1 lanes. Following its competitors, SiS also added Gigabit Ethernet support into its new product.

SiS965 is a more advanced version of the SiS965L I/O controller. The novelty is expected to feature 2 PCI-Express x1 ports, 6 PCI ports, 4 Serial ATA-150 ports with hot plug functionality and RAID, 2-channel Parallel ATA-33/66/100/133, 10/100/1000Mb/s Ethernet, 8 USB 2.0 ports, 8-channel sound, etc.

Silicon Integrated Systems did not elaborate whether the SiS965 is pin-to-pin compatible with SiS965L and therefore may be matched with SiS’ existing core-logic sets, such as SiS661FX, SiS648FX, SiS655FX, SiS655TX, SiS748, SiS755, SiS755FX and SiS760. Obviously, SiS965 is likely to be compatible with SiS’ future offerings, such as SiS656, SiS656FX, SiS756, SiS R659FX and SiSR659TX.

VIA Technologies and NVIDIA Corporation will also unleash their I/O controllers and MCPs with Gigabit Ethernet and PCI Express support later this year. VIA is expected to bring its VT8251 chip with PCI Express x1 and Gigabit Ethernet in mid-year. NVIDIA is a bit behind the general PCI Express schedule – its products with GbE support are projected to come out this quarter, while chips that pack both GbE and PCI Express are due only sometime in the second half of the year. Intel will add PCI Express x1 into its ICH6 family of controllers, but will keep offering GbE as additional chip.

SiS did not comment on mass production and availability timeframes for the new product.