SiS: New Chipsets, New Due Dates

by Anna Filatova
01/04/2002 | 10:16 PM

We managed to come across some very interesting info about the launching dates for the new SiS chipsets for Pentium 4 processors here. Let us share some bits with you:

• The discrete SiS655 and integrated SiS660 chipsets, which we have already told you about here, will really be sent into mass production in Q3 2002, and the first engineering samples of these solutions will be available for the mainboard manufacturers in Q2 2002 already. Moreover, they have even revealed a more or less exact schedule for the first engineering samples to come out: it will happen in April. We would like to remind you that these chipsets will differ from their predecessors (SiS645 and SiS650) by the support of 533MHz Quad Pumped Bus, AGP 8x interface, and will be provided with a new SiS962 South Bridge supporting ATA/133, USB 2.0 and IEEE 1394a.
• However, this is not all. It turned out that SiS is going to launch two intermediate models before the mentioned above new solutions come out. They will be SiS646 and SiS651, which we haven’t ever told you about. The only difference between these chipsets and their SiS645 and SiS650 predecessors is the support of the new 533MHz Quad Pumped Bus these chipsets may go with the old SiS961 South Bridge as well as with the new SiS962 South Bridge, and will certainly inherit all architectural changes typical of SiS645 A2 chipset revision (see this news story). As we can see, this company also didn’t manage to avoid the pseudo-modification practice. The samples of the pseudo-new SiS646 and SiS651 will be available this month already, and the mass shipments should start next month.