Not so long ago it seemed to us that SiS’ solution was an indisputable leader in an announced competition between two DDR333 chipsets for AMD Athlon CPUs: VIA KT333 and SiS745. However, a month has already passed and the situation changed: KT333 started shipping in mass quantities, the mainboards based on it are announced in an endless chain. Moreover, one of these boards has already started retailing (see this news story). No doubt that in the nearest future we will also see other mainboards selling.

And what about SiS745? Well, we could say that the situation hardly got any different during the last month. The only mainboard built on it, which is available now was and is K7S6A from Elitegroup. In other words, the situation is quite common for SiS: its production capacities are enough only to provide its closest partner with the chipsets. As for all the other mainboard manufacturers, there seem to be far not enough chipsets for them.

SiS claims that the situation will improve only in March (they promise to increase the production of SiS745 solution). And in the meanwhile… In the meanwhile VIA will keep winning bigger share of the Athlon chipset market.

I believe that SiS has should speed up the whole thing with CSM (Chartered Semiconductor Manufacturing), if there is anything about it at all. Otherwise, they will lose the battle with VIA here completely...