The changes made to Intel roadmap lately pushed not only VIA, but also SiS to revise their own plans accordingly. The company changed its plans concerning future Pentium 4 chipsets really severely. That is why I considered it really interesting to take a closer look at what we can expect from SiS in the future.

First of all, I would like to say that SiS is about to start shipping new chipset revisions supporting Hyper-Threading technology really soon. The matter is that SiS645DX, SiS648 and integrated SiS651 solutions, which are rather popular in the market today, do not support Hyper-Threading. Now SiS solved this problem and in the nearest future we will see the B revisions of the above listed chipsets in the market. All of them will have enabled Hyper-Threading support.

However, the beginning of mass shipments of SiSR658, which will support dual-channel PC1066 RDRAM has been postponed. Sis is now expected to start shipping the “B” revision of this solution in February next year, which will also support Hyper-Threading.

Also they will delay the launching of one more solution, since they will have to implement Hyper-Threading support there too. It will be SiS655. This chipset, which will use dual-channel DDR333 SDRAM is scheduled to appear in February too, and will also be represented by a “B” revision from the very beginning. However, neither SiS655, nor SiSR658 will support the new Pentium 4 CPUs with 800MHz bus.

As for the chipsets, which will be able to work with Pentium 4 CPUs supporting 800MHz bus, SiS is going to start shipping them only in April. Then the company will announce SiS648FX (a version of SiS648 supporting 800MHz Quad Pumped Bus and officially supporting DDR400 memory). The dual-channel chipset supporting new processors and DDR400 SDRAM is due only in July. It will be a new version aka SiS655FX.

In the end of next year SiS is planning to announce a new chipset supporting DDR-II. It will be SiS656 supporting Pentium 4 processors with 533/800MHz bus and Hyper-Threading technology. The memory subsystem in this solution will be built with dual-channel 533MHz DDR-II SDRAM. Since SiS656 will be targeted for high-performance PCs, the chipset will also support ECC and AGP 8x.

At the same time, SiS will continue making integrated chipsets for Pentium 4 processors. In March the company is planning to release SiS648 Rev. B with the integrated Ultra256 Graphics graphics core, which will be called SiS660. A little later, next July, SiS661 integrated chipset will come out. It will be based on SiS648FX with the Real256E Graphics core.

SiS also plans a few products for the upcoming AMD platforms. Following the launch of SiS746 supporting Socket A CPUs with 200/266MHz bus, DDR333 memory and AGP 8x, which is delayed for some reasons, SiS will announce a new version of this solution aka SiS746DX. The newcomer with the “DX” index will also acquire official support of the DDR400 SDRAM and 333MHz processor bus.

SiS746DX will be the last chipset from SiS for Socket A processors, even though AMD is going to keep supporting this platform for at least another year and a half. That is why we will never see any DDR-II or dual-channel DDR solutions from SiS for AMD Athlon XP CPUs.

Then, SiS will also develop and produce chipsets for the upcoming Hammer processors. The first one aka SiS755 will be manufactured in limited quantities in February 2003 already. SiS755 will support AGP 8x interface and Athlon 64 processors.

Then in May SiS760 will arrive. It will feature integrated Ultra356 graphics core based on Xabre-like architecture. In October one more integrated solution for Athlon 64 will be launched: SiS761. This will be none other but SiS760 chipset with the graphics core replaced with Real256 Graphics.

As for the South Bridges used in SiS chipsets, in the nearest future they will all be connected to the North Bridges via the MuTIOL bus with 1GB\sec bandwidth. Following the recently introduced SiS963 with ATA/133, 6 USB 2.0 ports and 3 IEEE1394 ports, we will see the next one, SiS964, some time in July 2003. This South Bridge will feature integrated SerialATA-150 controller supporting 2 ports and will offer 8 USB 2.0 ports.

Also SiS Company is planning to launch a stand-alone SerialATA controller next March. This chip, known as SiS180, will support two ATA/133 and two SerialATA-150 ports, and will be offered to the mainboard manufacturers as an intermediate solution until the new SiS964 is released.