There are a lot of facts proving that the new SiS740 and SiS745 chipsets will be announced officially in the nearest future. Although according to the company roadmap, which we have recently seen, SiS740 chipset should be launched in Q1 2002 and SiS645 – in Q2 2002, SiS made up its mind to speed things up and to introduce these products earlier, especially SiS745. At least their web-site has already got special pages devoted to the newcomers.
So, according to this official specification, SiS745 is a successor to SiS735. This Socket A chipset will also be designed as a single-chip chipset comprising the North and South Bridges connected by the special Multi-Threaded I/O Link Bus with 1.2GB/sec bandwidth. The new features implemented in SiS745 will include the official support for DDR333 memory and an integrated IEEE 1394A controller. So, the complete specs of this solution will look as follows:

• Support for Athlon and Duron CPUs with 200MHz/266MHz bus;
• Up to 1.5GB DDR333/DDR266/PC133 memory (6 banks);
• AGP 4x;
• Integrated 10/100MB Fast Ethernet or 1/10MB HomePNA 1.0 controllers;
• AC’97 V2.1 audio and modem codec;
• Integrated IEEE 1394A controller supporting 3 ports;
• 2 USB hubs supporting up to 6 ports;
• Integrated ATA/100 IDE controller;
• Up to 6 PCI Master devices;
• CNR/ACR slots supported.

As for the second chipset, SiS740, it is a new generation DDR Socket A solution. According to this official specification, this chipset will include SiS740 North Bridge and SiS961 South Bridge connected by MuTIOL bus with 533MB/sec bandwidth. This core logic will have an integrated SiS315 graphics core with UMA architecture, featuring 2 rendering pipelines with 2 TMUs on each. The core also has a hardware T&L unit. The chipset doesn’t support external AGP graphics cards, however, the integrated graphics core uses AGP 8s bus. Also the chipset will support dual-monitor configurations and stereoscopic glasses, which will require SiS301B companion chip. All in all, here are the SiS740 specs:

• Support for Athlon and Duron CPUs with 200MHz/266MHz bus;
• Up to 1.5GB DDR266/PC133 memory (6 banks);
• Integrated SiS315 graphics core;
• Integrated 10/100MB Fast Ethernet or 1/10MB HomePNA 1.0 controllers;
• AC’97 V2.1 audio and modem codec;
• 2 USB hubs supporting up to 6 ports;
• Integrated ATA/100 IDE controller;
• Up to 6 PCI Master devices;
• CNR/ACR slots supported.

Well, now we can only wait for the final official announcements of these chipsets and their pricing. However, we are ready to state that this upcoming couple is going to be pretty successful, due to at least high performance and low price.