SiS Initiates Shipments of PCI Express Chipsets

by Anton Shilov
02/19/2005 | 12:21 PM

Silicon Integrated Systems Corp., a chipset designer from Taiwan, said it initiated mass production and shipments of its chipsets for Intel Pentium 4 and AMD Athlon 64 platforms with support for PCI Express interconnection technology. The first actual products based on SiS logic supporting PCI Express are expected to emerge next month, 10 months later than the company promised in May, 2004.

PCs with SiS’ PCI Express Chipsets to Come Next Month

“The SiS656, SiS649, and SiS756 chipsets are being adopted by at least 10 mainboard manufacturers. The successful design-win models to date include 26 motherboards, 23 desktop computers and 3 notebook computers,” SiS said in its statement.

SiS claims that by now, two million of its PCI Express chipsets have already been shipped to manufacturers of various applications from the USA, Europe, Japan and Taiwan. Related end-products equipped with SiS PCI Express chipsets will officially be available on the market at the beginning of March, 2005.

It is unclear whether SiS has won any designs with world’s major OEMs.

SiS PCI Express Chipsets Lineup

SiS656 core-logic is the company’s first North-Bridge to support PCI Express x16 bus for graphics as well as dual-channel DDR/DDR2 memory controllers that is capable to handle 400MHz, 533MHz and 667MHz memory modules delivering up to 10.6GB/s of peak memory bandwidth, substantially higher than required nowadays. The new chipset will work with Intel’s Pentium 4 and Celeron D processors in mPGA478 or LGA775 packaging with 400MHz, 533MHz or 800MHz Quad Pumped Bus. SiS656FX North-Bridge will also support chips with 1066MHz processor System bus.

The company also offers SiS649, which is an entry-level North-Bridge that sports Intel Pentium 4 processors and PCI Express x16 lane for graphics cards. SiS originally said it sported single-channel DDR or DDR2 memory controller, but the latest press-release from the company states SiS649 has gained dual-channel memory controller.

SiS756 chipset is intended for AMD Athlon 64 processors with 1000MHz HyperTransport bus. The North Bridge of the core-logic sports PCI Express x16 interconnection for graphics cards.

All SiS’ North Bridge chips – SiS656, SiS649, SiS756 – can be paired with SiS965 and SiS965L I/O controllers. SiS965L features 2 PCI-Express x1 ports, 6 PCI ports, 8 USB 2.0 ports, 8-channel sound, 10/100Mb/s Ethernet, 2 Serial ATA-150 ports with hot plug functionality and RAID, 2-channel Parallel ATA-33/66/100/133. More advanced version of the chip – SiS965 – 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.