Silicon Integrated Systems Corp., a chipset designer from Taiwan, has announced that its chipsets with built-in graphics core featuring DirectX 10 capabilities would be available in early 2007.

Hank Lee, technical marketing manager at SiS, told reporters of HKEPC web-site that SiS672 and SiS772 core-logic sets due to be released in Q1 2007 will feature Mirage 4 graphics engine, which supports DirectX 10 capabilities, H.264 hardware decoding along with several technologies to improve quality of video output. The new graphics core will be able to use up to 256MB of system memory for frame-buffer and output using DisplayPort interface.

SiS’ SiS672 will be aimed to support processors with quad pumped bus, namely Intel Pentium 4, Pentium D, Celeron, Core and Core 2, however, SiS did not specify, which chips will actually be supported. The SiS772 will support AMD64 processors.

SiS, which is the second company known to work on DirectX 10-compatible core for integration into core-logic products, did not reveal any peculiarities of the technology, its implementation and also did not provide any specs or performance estimations. Being concentrated on chipsets for very low-cost personal computers (PCs), SiS is usually not concerned about performance of its integrated graphics cores in games.

Intel Corp. is also planning to release its own DirectX 10-compatible Intel Graphics Media Accelerator 3000 within its G965 and Q965 chipsets this year. While the GMA 3000 is unlikely to become a performance champ, just like the Mirage 4, the release of the DirectX 10 marks virtually the first time when integrated graphics cores matche capabilities of standalone graphics products from market leaders ATI or Nvidia Corp.

Microsoft DirectX 10 will be released along with Windows Vista operating system in early 2007.