SIS told us about its 659 Rambus chipset at last year"s CeBIT and the game is far from over on this front, it appeared from a conversation we had with the firm today. The 659 has already been built into an Asus motherboard, and supports PC 1200, but there"s more on the way for enthusiasts who recognise the technical benefits of the memory type.
Sources suggested that SIS would introduce two further revs of its Rambus chipsets – the R659FX, a four channel PC1333 version, and the R658TX, four channel PC1600 16dx2. Like other chipset firms, SIS will roll out DDR 2 chipsets but we suspect there"s a bit of a problem with this memory type. That is to say, you will pay extra money for not very much more performance. Again, like the other chipset firms, SIS will create products that support PCI Express, but we understand from sources that the process of creating any semiconductor product for PCI-E is quite difficult at the wafer level.