Silicon Integrated Systems said it would be first to market with PCI Express technology ahead of competition. The company believes that its mainboard partners will start commercial production of their products featuring PCI Express slots and SiS’ core-logic already next month.

At this point SiS has SiS965 and SiS965L I/O controllers with support for PCI Express x1 lanes announced. The company has not introduced its North Bridges with support for PCI Express x16 for graphics cards bus. It is not clear whether add-in PCI Express x1 cards will be available in June 2004, but leading developers of graphics cards said they would supply their new PEG x16 offerings in June.

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.

Silicon Integrated Systems did not elaborate whether the SiS965 is pin-to-pin compatible with SiS965L and therefore may be matched with SiS’ existing core-logic sets, such as SiS661FX, SiS648FX, SiS655FX, SiS655TX, SiS748, SiS755, SiS755FX and SiS760, like the SiS965L. Obviously, SiS965 is likely to be compatible with SiS’ future offerings, such as SiS656, SiS656FX, SiS756, SiS R659FX and SiSR659TX.