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Post to SlashdotIntel continues to charge its partners for the rights of manufacturing and selling chipsets for a certain and concrete platform, not for the Quad Pumped Bus technology itself. Silicon Integrated Systems today announced the company has reached agreement with Intel Corporation for a Pentium M microprocessor [bus] license. This gives SiS the necessary rights to build chipsets based on Intel Pentium M microprocessors. Additional details of the agreement were not disclosed. Besides, SiS today also unveiled its chipsets and WLAN components for building an Intel Centrino competing platform.
SiS now offers SiS648MX and SiS M661MX core-logic sets for Intel Pentium M and Intel Mobile Celeron microprocessors. The former chipset is a discrete solution; the latter is a core-logic with integrated graphics core. Both North Bridges may be paired with SiS963 I/O controller and derivatives.
Additionally, SiS offers a 802.11b-compliant SiS162 WLAN solution with USB 2.0 support.
SiS648MX and SiS M661MX support 400MHz Quad Pumped Bus utilized by Pentium M and Mobile Celeron CPUs, single-channel PC3200 memory, MuTIOL 1G interface for connection with South Bridges, AGP 8x and SiS’ HyperStreaming Engine for more efficient I/O systems functioning and so on. SiS’ Real256E graphics core integrated into M661MX is based on DirectX 7-class SiS315 architecture and incorporates 2 pixel rendering pipelines with 2 TMUs on each one. The core is clocked at about 200MHz or lower and is able to work with 32-64MB frame-buffer utilising SMA architecture. Additionally, Real256E is bundled with 333MHz RAMDAC, NTSC/PAL TV-Out and Digital Interface support for various types of monitors.
With own chipsets and WLAN solutions, SiS may be in a position to offer an alternative to Intel Centrino platform, at least at this point it seems that SiS’ new products have practically no drawbacks compared to Intel’s own platforms
Mass production of SiS648MX and SiSM661MX will commence in the fourth quarter of 2003. Mainboards and platforms powered by these chipsets will be available in the market in early 2004, by the time Dothan processors show up.
