by Anna Filatova
04/15/2002 | 12:57 PM
We get more and more rumors from Taiwan about the tension growing between Intel and SiS. The thing is about 533MHz Quad Pumped Bus license used in a new SiS645DX chipset.
As we have already mentioned in our news (see this news story), the license fees Intel claims from the Pentium 4 chipset makers are pretty high, which prevents NVIDIA for instance, even from considering the mere possibility of producing solutions for Intel processors. In fact, I supposed that Intel set some special extremely high rate (of $5) for NVIDIA, because Intel didn’t feel like granting them Pentium 4 bus license at all. Today we found out that the rate was higher, but not that much higher than for other manufacturers. For instance, SiS pays around $4 fees for each sold Pentium 4 chipset, which means that my suppositions were absolutely correct (see this news story). At best, SiS will get $4 profit from each SiS645 chipset sold for around $20, and if worst comes to worst – the company gets nothing at all (will be producing chipsets for free, in other words).<%BANNER[article]%>
However, the problems do not end here. It turned out that Intel wanted to get additional license fees for the use of 533MHz Pentium 4 Quad Pumped Bus, as the license SiS received last year is valid only for 400MHz QP bus. And SiS doesn’t want to do it stating something like that: “officially we support only 400MHz bus in our SiS645DX chipset, and as for 533MHz frequency, the user can set it himself” (in other words it is all about overclocking supported almost by all mainboards). And you know what? There is no direct mention about the support of faster 533MHz bus frequency in the SiS645DX specifications on the company web-site (there is no mention about any processor bus at all!).
Of course, these are trifling things, as we all know very well that SiS645DX officially supports 533MHz Quad Pumped Bus, because it was designed as a SiS645 chipset with 533MHz Quad Pumped Bus support. And Intel is very unlikely to fall for this bait. They will also hardly forget that SiS takes advantage of its acquaintances among the Taiwanese manufacturers and sells some of its SiS645DX chipsets under XP4 name avoiding paying license fees this way. I cannot predict what will the whole thing result in, but it seems quite logical for Intel to reduce the license fees per chipset a bit, as it will make many things simpler for everybody.