Silicon Integrated Systems Wednesday reiterated its commitment to high-end platforms by announcing its latest chipset for upcoming Intel Pentium 4 processors that sports PCI Express and DDR2 technologies.
The newly unveiled at Computex Taipei 2004 show SiS656 core-logic is the company’s first North-Bridge to support PCI Express x16 bus for graphics as well as dual-channel DDR/DDR2 memory controllers that is capable to handle 400MHz, 533MHz and 667MHz memory modules delivering up to 10.6GB/s of peak memory bandwidth, substantially higher than required nowadays. The new chipset will work with Intel’s Pentium 4 and Celeron processors in mPGA478 or LGA775 packaging with 400MHz, 533MHz or 800MHz Quad Pumped Bus.
It is not clear whether a lot of customers opt to go 667MHz DDR2 route with high-performance system keeping in mind that bandwidth provided by the memory sub-system will be much more compared to what is required by microprocessors with up to 800MHz processor system bus that transfers up to 6.40GB/s of data. OCZ Technology and Samsung Microelectronics vowed they would supply memories at 667MHz or even beyond this year. Micron, Infineon, Hynix and Elpida are also looking in 667MHz direction and may also begin supplies in 2004.
The SiS656 will be coupled with SiS965 I/O controller supporting nearly everything demanding users can request in 2004. 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 (via external PHY), 8 USB 2.0 ports, 8-channel audio, etc..
Hsinchu, Taiwan-based chipset designer said the SiS656 core-logic is “on the market”, but was tight-lipped about the actual product availability.
Comments currently:
3
Discussion started: 06/02/04 11:28:49 AM
Latest comment: 06/03/04 10:43:08 AM
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1.
Uh, what exactly is the point of running DDRII 667, when the bus can only handle Dual Channel 400MHz? All bandwidth above 6.4GB/s will be wasted, and it will likely perform even worse, since the latency is horrible on DDRII, and will be even worse with DDRII 667 than with 533. This seems like they are doing it just for show, rather than for any increase in performance. Intel needs not just 1 FSB speed bump, but 2 to catch up with its memory speed, and that won't happen for a while.
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Posted by: gobucks
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Date: 06/02/04 11:28:49 AM]
2.
"seems like they are doing it just for show"
Bingo! Proof of concept if nothing else.
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Posted by: kodiak81
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Date: 06/02/04 05:25:19 PM]
3.
You #1 and #2 are all wrong!
Intel is right, DDR2 gives them what RDRAM already delivered, high bandwidth and high latencies, intel processor are "made" to work with higher latencies.
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Posted by: I
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Date: 06/03/04 10:43:08 AM]
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