Nearly half a year has passed since SiS announced their R658 core-logic, but today the company said that ABIT had finally started to produce their SI7 mainboards in mass quantities. It means that SiS only started to sell their R658 in late December or early January, what is “slightly” later than the Hsinchu-based chipset developer originally wanted. I still remember a SiS spokesperson emphasized in early August that the company was making great efforts in order to deliver the product on time and the price was not the point then. Well, it seems that the timeframe was not the point as well…

SiS R658 supports 400/533MHz Quad Pumped Bus, AGP 8x, 2-channel RDRAM PC800, PC1066 and PC1200 memory, according to ABIT. In case the latter simply allows overclocking of RDRAM memory, there is no surprise, but if the R658 now supports PC1200 by default, it means that SiS had updated their specs. The North Bridge is accompanied by the SiS963 I/O controller, connected using 16-bit MuTIOL, providing up to 1GB/sec peak bandwidth.

ABIT, who also delayed their SI7 for about two months (see this news-story) decided not to announce its technical details even now. All they said was that the novelty offers Gigabit LAN, Serial ATA, IEEE 1394a and USB 2.0/1.1 support.

According to ABIT, SI7 is in mass production now. When the actual products will hit the shelves of stores and how much will they cost was not unveiled at this time.