SiS, Taiwanese chipset manufacturer, well-known for its liking of single-chip chipsets, is about to announce a new product family including separate North and South Bridge microchips. Practice showed, that although the merging of the North and South Bridges into a single microchip allows reducing the manufacturing expenses, it requires extra financing when the development of new products is in progress. The thing is that classical chipsets, consisting of two chips, can boast South Bridges living much longer than the North ones, which life cycle makes at least half a year. That’s why SiS decided to single out the South Bridge and to make it a separate chipset part.
The first new generation South Bridge aka SiS961 will start sampling in Q2 already. It will support ATA/100, LAN and other things.
The new Bridge will debut in SiS640 and SiS740 chipsets supporting DDR SDRAM and intended for Socket370 and Socket A respectively. We should point out that SiS will be using a special internal bus with the bandwidth equal to 1.2GB/sec to connect the bridges of the chipset.