Silicon Integrated Systems Corp., a leading designer of chipsets and other input/output logic, reportedly said it would begin to ship its PCI Express chipsets for Intel Pentium 4 and AMD Athlon 64 processors in the second half of December.

A report from DigiTimes web-site based on comments coming from SiS’ representatives claims SiS656, SiS649 and SiS756 chipsets are to be shipped in volume in the second half of December, possibly in days from now. It usually takes mainboard makers two or three weeks after they received chipsets to make the first batch of mainboards, therefore, actual products based on the above mentioned chipsets are likely to emerge in late January, 2005.

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. SiS649 is an entry-level chipset that sports Intel Pentium 4 processors, single-channel DDR or DDR2 memory as well as PCI Express x16 lane for graphics cards.

SiS756 chipset is intended for AMD Athlon 64 processors with 1000MHz HyperTransport bus. The North Bridge of the core-logic sports PCI Express x16 interconnection for graphics cards.

All SiS’ North Bridge chips – SiS656, SiS649, SiS756 – can be paired with SiS965 and SiS965L I/O controllers. 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.

Currently it is unclear, which mainboard makers are to introduce mainboards based on SiS’ latest PCI Express-supporting chipsets.