by Anna Filatova
05/22/2002 | 09:12 AM
Elitegroup made a special press-release devoted to the upcoming Computex show and the products they are going to showcase there. Of course, they mentioned mane expected solutions on i845E, i845G, i845GL, VIA P4X333, P4X266A, P4M266, SiS645DX and 650GL chipsets. However, among them we found one very exciting announcement: it turned out that the company was going to launch L4S8A mainboard on SiS648 chipset (SiS648DX) in June already (maybe even during the show). It will support DDR400, USB 2.0, AGP 8x, IEEE1394, LAN and 533MHz QP bus (the detailed specifications of the upcoming SiS648/SiS963 are available here). Besides, they are also planning to provide their mainboard with an onboard ATA/133 RAID controller.
The interesting thing is that SiS is planning to release this chipset only in Q3 (see this news story). And taking into account that SIS is usually pretty slow, we wouldn’t expect the chipsets to start shipping even in July. In fact, we expect the first samples to start shipping to the mainboard makers in July, and we don’t think that SiS will manage to begin mass shipment the same month. So, August seems to be the closest time frame for SiS648 to go mass. Then what’s the reason for such an early mainboard launch? Almost 2 months prior! Is it aimed at demonstrating excellent relations with SiS? In fact we all know about it pretty well already :)