SiS’s administration seems to have come to the idea that the production of many different products in mass quantities is too hard for the company. It’s true, for the last several months the company managed to start really "mass" shipments in the full meaning of this word of only one chipset: SiS645 for Pentium 4 processors. The potentially successful solutions for Athlon CPUs haven’t reached the mass market because of the very limited supplies of chipsets to the manufacturers.

As a result, SiS decided to slightly move the accents and to start focusing on Pentium 4 chipsets in the first place, leaving the development of Socket A solutions a bit aside. This is a pretty logical decision we should say, taking into account that SiS has a license for Pentium 4 chipsets production, which frees it from competition with VIA here. Moreover, SIS last experience with Athlon chipsets can hardly be called a success. Since the coming of VIA KT266A, SiS’ chipsets keep falling behind the competing products from this Taiwanese chipset maker.

In this respect the last company roadmap dating back to the end of March has become considerably smaller in the part devoted to AMD chipsets. Let’s have a closer look at it.

In the end of Q2’01 SiS is going to announce it new chipset SIS746. This solution, unlike the predecessors, will consist of two chips and will use SiS962 for the South Bridge. SiS962 will support ATA/133, USB 2.0, IEEE1394. The North Bridge of this core logic on the whole will boast the same features as SiS745, however, it will also acquire AGP 8x support. Please take note that we are not speaking about the implementation of the DDR400 support in this solution. As a result, SiS decided to let VIA dominate in the high-performance Socket A chipset market, as approximately at that time VIA should introduce its new KT400 solution with DDR400 support. Moreover, SiS746 is the last Socket A chipset from SiS. All other Socket A solutions from SiS will be designed to support Hammer only.

For Q3’02 SiS planned the launching of the first ClawHammer chipset aka SiS755 to come. This product will support ClawHammer and AGP 8x bus. Together with the SiS755 North Bridge it will comprise SiS963 South Bridge supporting 1GB/sec MuTIOL bus connecting the chipset bridges, ATA/133, USB 2.0, IEEE1394. Also SiS755 may use SiS963B South Bridge, which will also support ADSL. Besides all the rest.

In the end of Q4’02 SiS is going to release an integrated SiS755 called SiS760. Besides the already listed features of SiS755 this solution will also have a SiS330 based integrated graphics core.

Summing up, I would like to say once again that SiS gave up the idea of making any more Athlon chipsets. The last product for this platform should be SiS746 without DDR400 support. After that the company is going to focus on the chipsets for Hammer and Pentium 4 only. As for SiS’ plans for Pentium 4, I will be telling you more in the nearest future.