SiS announced that they would start mass production of their new SiS635T and SiS633T chipsets supporting Pentium III CPU on new 0.13 micron Tualatin core this month. As you may have already guessed, these chipsets are analogous to the well-known SiS635 (supporting DDR SDRAM and PC100/PC133 SDRAM) and "phantom" SiS633 (supporting PC100/PC133 SDRAM) respectively.
But as you know, Intel is going to start mass manufacturing of these processors only in Q3 this year. We have absolutely no idea why SiS is in such a hurry then. The company is most likely to have taken note of its previous faults, when they started mass production of the chipsets too late, and decided to speed up the new products, so that they could turn up somewhat earlier. However, we don’t think it’s good to jump from one extreme to another. We do understand their desire to provide the mainboard manufacturers with the chipset samples beforehand, however, we are hardly capable to perceive why on earth they are starting the mass production about half a year prior to the CPU launching. The only more or less acceptable explanation is SiS’s intention to shift from the "older" SiS635 and SiS633 chipsets to new ones as soon as possible. But in this case another question crops up: why did they launch SiS635 then?
All in all, Pentium III CPUs on a new core seem to be getting support half a year in advance. And SiS hopes that its SiS635T and SiS633T chipsets will help them win about 30% of the discrete (without the integrated graphics) chipset market this year. Well, good luck, guys...