Following Intel’s intention to cancel its i850E and i860 chipsets with RDRAM support (see May 17, 2003 news-story), ABIT deleted all mentions about its SI7 mainboard on its own web-site. Looks like the only mainboard based on SiS’ first RDRAM-supporting chipset is discontinued and will never emerge again.

The decision of the mainboard maker comes without any surprises because performance of ABIT SI7 and SiS R658 chipset was lower compared to competing devices (see this news-story), whereas the price of solutions with RDRAM memory is considerably higher than the price of DDR SDRAM-supporting PCs. Looks like end-users clearly understood that there is absolutely no need to pay for expensive RDRAM and bought very few mainboards. Seeing that the demand was not really high, ABIT decided to discontinue the product keeping in mind the fact that it will not be competitive when dual-channel DDR SDRAM mainboards with 800MHz Quad Pumped Bus hit the market massively later this year.

The picture of ABIT SI7 mainboard taken by GamePC web-site is now almost legendary since the guys also have written the one and only R658 review ever.

Originally planned to come in the third quarter of 2003, SiS’ R658 core-logic with dual-channel PC800, PC1066 and PC1200 RDRAM support was late to market and the first and the last mainboard featuring this chipset emerged in March 2003. As you see, it existed for less than three month.

PS. I will not be surprised if SiS eventually cancels the development of SiS R659 chipset with 4-channel RDRAM support (see this and this news-stories for more details on R659). This will mean that RDRAM will be fully thrown-out from personal computers.