X-bit labs

March 2004 Hardware News Overview (page 6)

Category: Editorial

by Andy Yaschenko

[ 03/15/2004 | 02:11 AM ]

It’s the same with VIA, which released its PT890 and which reference boards have two graphics interfaces, although it’s still uncertain if PCI Express and AGP cards can work along together. Regrettably, PT890 doesn’t support PCI Express 1x as VIA doesn’t have the necessary South Bridge.

SiS, on the contrary, can’t stop producing them, announcing its second chipset in February, SiS965, which is a variation of the earlier SiS965L with an integrated Gigabit Ethernet controller. This is just announcement, though, and we should wait until the mass production starts.

In fact, SiS was very active in February. Besides the new South Bridge and claims about full support of the newly-born Prescott starting from SiS648FX (actually, even the 854 would bear the Prescott provided there is well-designed power circuitry), they continue with their strategic support of RDRAM in the near future. They are preparing new chipsets with support of this memory type till SiS659TX scheduled for 2005, which is going to work with PC1600 RDRAM (its 6.4GB/s bandwidth only equals 800MHz of PC6400 DDR2…), PCI Express and other advanced technologies. I’m really confused about the purpose and targeting of this product.

These chipsets will be produced for SiS by UMC, as SiS abandoned its fabrication past completely, selling SiS Microelectronics (its only 200mm fab) to UMC. That’s a positive fact for the company, as SiS had been feeling the lack of production facilities and the construction of their fab solved the problem. Now that they have normalized their relationship with UMC, there appeared the opportunity of making chips cheaper at UMC’s fabs and SiS feels no need for a fab of their own anymore.

Other companies, like the heavy-weight Intel, don’t shun placing orders with third-party makers, like TSMC. Intel also had its new chipset in February, the first from the spring line, called E7210 (Canterwood-ES). It was the first probably because it was the simplest of all. And it is the simplest because it is the well-known i875P with a new South Bridge and support of the 64-bit PCI-X bus. Manufacturers of server mainboards soon revealed their products on this chipset and I suspect they didn’t have to work hard to do that. First mainboards were already available in February.

It’s more complicated with the Grantsdale and Alderwood. Of course, they showed mainboards on these chipsets at IDF, but we are unlikely to see them in mass quantities in shops until the end of the spring, even if the chipsets are announced as promised, in the end of March. Again, announcement and production are two different matters, even for Intel. Otherwise, there were no surprises in the specs. Overall, February was the month of waiting for further events. I hope March is going to be somewhat more interesting.

Winding up the mainboards section of our overview, I’d like to recall some basic things, that is, buses. In February, there were two remarkable events. They ratified the HyperTransport 2.0 standard with a clock rate increased from 800MHz to 1-1.4GHz, and a higher bandwidth (the bus width remained the same). Among major innovations: HyperTransport now is compatible with the PCI Express. The second event was the Infiniband developer forum, which discussed the problem of increasing the bandwidth of this bus, aiming at 100GB/s.