As we learned from SiS’ earlier plans (see this news story), the company was going to introduce their new Xabre II family supporting DirectX9 only next year. Moreover, they were only going to start sampling these products in the far away February 2003. Therefore, keeping in mind that SiS is usually "kind of slow", their mass production could appear postponed nearly until next summer.

However, as we learned from one of our unofficial sources, the chips have every chance to appear in the market a bit earlier, this year already. Although we are talking only about the chipset announcement here and not about the mass production. So, it is still most likely to start selling only next year, but in the beginning and not in the middle of the year as everybody has initially expected. By the way this chip will be manufactured with 0.13micron and the equipment for these production lines will be installed in Q3 2002. So, everything seems to make sense: in Q4 SiS starts making first 0.13micron wafers which are most likely to be the rumored Xabre II.

They also report that Xabre600 chip (275MHz chip and 600MHz (300MHz DDR) memory frequencies), the fastest Xabre solution, will come out in time: in Q3 2002. It will be manufactured with the same 0p.15micron technology, which is already used on half of all SiS’ production lines.