SiS continues to demonstrate its first RDRAM-supporting R658 core-logic for the Pentium 4 processors at IDF. The company first showcased their chipset at Computex Taipei in early June and officially announced it in late July. It is September and we have not yet seen any actual products utilising this novelty from the Taiwanese chipset-maker.

SiS originally hoped to release the R658 sometime during the third quarter this year. When I spoke to some of SiS representatives in August, they decided not to tell me the timeframes when the products are available, this time at IDF, some Taiwanese sources alluded us that the R658 based mainboards will be available in late October or even November.

Remember that SiS R658 supports 400/533MHz Quad Pumped Bus, AGP 8x, 2-channel RDRAM PC800/PC1066 memory. The North Bridge will be accompanied by the SiS963 I/O controller, connected using 16-bit MuTIOL, providing up to1GB/sec peak bandwidth. The specs look quite promising right now and considering that RDRAM memory is still the best solution for the Pentium 4 platform, we can expect the R658 to be pretty successful, since there will be no rivals in terms of features for it. As it is widely recognised, Intel’s Granite Bay is intended for workstations and will be fairly expensive, while the i850E does not support AGP 8x and USB 2.0. But even despite of the fact that there are no competitors, SiS would be better to hurry their RDRAM product up anyway.