Today Tom’s Hardware reported that SiS started shipping the first samples of its Xabre graphics chips. In the first place the graphics card makers will receive Xabre 80, Xabre 200 and Xabre 400.

Moreover, we have to stress that the chips specifications have undergone some changes since the official announcement at CeBIT (see this news story). Although the number of pipelines and TMU units remained the same as well as AGP 8x and DirectX 8.1 support, the working frequencies are a bit different.

• Xabre 200 (SiS332) will now work at 200MHz chip frequency and 333MHz DDR SDRAM frequency.
• Xabre 400 (SiS334) will support 250MHz chip and 500MHz memory frequency.
• More details about the slowest model, Xabre 80 (SiS328), emerged. This graphics accelerator from SiS will work at the same frequencies as Xabre 200 but will support 64bit DDR SDRAM.
• The fastest solution in the entire family, Xabre 600 (SiS336), will start shipping next quarter and will work at 275MHz chip and 600MHz DDR SDRAM frequencies.

Moreover, SiS has already planned the next generation Xabre II solution. The company roadmap states that Xabre II samples will be available next February already. As for the key features of the chip, we should mention AGP 8x and DirectX 9.0 support.

SiS will position its Xabre family as direct competitors to low-cost graphics accelerators built on ATI and NVIDIA chips. Xabre 200 and Xabre 400 will be competing with RADEON 7500 and GeForce4 MX420 and MX440, and the fastest Xabre 600 will be a rival to RV250 and MX460.

At present SiS continues working on the drivers for Xabre family, which should meet DirectX 8.1 requirements and implement software vertex shaders.