It is already known that VIA’s market share plummets, meanwhile SiS’ manages to gain its market presence (see this news story). It is a paradox, but although the latter has been quite successful on the Socket 478 front, they are always late with the Socket A platform chipsets. The former did not want to secure a license on the Quad Pumped Bus from Intel, as a result, their Pentium 4 core-logic sets are not popular among PC vendors and mainboard manufacturers. Furthermore, sometimes VIA’s chipsets for the Pentium 4 platform were not an optimal solution even in terms of price to features ratio. As a result of all the operations, VIA now leads the Socket A market, while SiS is attacking the Intel platform, being quite weak in AMD field.

If we take a look at what is offered by SiS for the Socket 478 platform, we will definitely notice a very broad range of solutions. There is SiS R658 for the very high-end systems, there is SiS648 for mainstream, accompanied by SiS645DX. A lot of computer suppliers make use of SiS650 and 651 in their low-end and barebone systems. The market is flooded with SiS645DX based mainboards, by now almost all makers of mainboards have announced their products powered by the latest SiS648. The R658 also seems to be somewhere just around the corner. On the other hand, if we take a look at VIA’s portfolio of Pentium 4 products, we will be surprised, but, we will find there a bit outdated P4X266A, the discontinued P4X333, about which VIA prefers to forget, and the P4X400 that was revealed back in July and which is not yet on the market. Integrated products offered by the company are aimed at system integrators, however, due to the legal dispute with Intel, these chipsets are not in demand at all.

Well, needless to say that among Taiwan based core-logic makers, SiS now seems to be more perspective compared to VIA and ALi, who even did not manage to launch a single new product this Summer. Although there is a big future for the x86-64 platform and all the chipset developers are going to enter this market, on the Pentium 4 front SiS is going to be much more successful than its Taiwanese rivals.

I want to add that the first SiS648 based mainboards, ASUS P4S8X, ABIT SR7-8X and Gigabyte GA-8SG667 has reached the retail market. Of course, all three products saw the light of the day in Japan, being priced at $145, $100 and $105 accordingly. All mainboards have very similar specifications:

• Support for Socket 478 Pentium 4 processors with 400/533MHz FSB;
• SiS648 + SiS963 core-logic;
• 3 DIMM slots for up to 3GB of PC2100 or PC2700 DDR SDRAM; Unofficially, you can still install certain DDR400 modules, Gigabyte even provides the list of supported models;
• 6 PCI slots on ASUS P4S8X / 5 PCI slots on ABIT SR7-8X and and Gigabyte GA-8SG667, 1 AGP 8x;
• Integrated 2-channel ATA-133 controller;
• AC’97 6-channel audio solution;
• 10/100Mbit Fast Ethernet controller;
• 6 USB 2.0 ports;
• IEEE1394 support, except Gigabyte;
• ATX Form Factor;

ASUS is priced $45 more and also adds ATA-133 RAID controller and 2 channel Serial ATA-150 controller. All three products support all possible overclocking and performance tuning features.

SiS648 mainboards will spread quickly all around the world, while I cannot state the same for the P4X400 based solutions that will only be sold by VPSD itself and maybe some of their relatively small partners. On the other hand, VIA KT400 for AMD’s Socket A is here, while SiS746 has not appeared yet, but more advanced version, SiS746DX, was showcased last month in Japan.