SiS has launched what it claims is the first integrated chipset designed to support the Pentium 4's effective 800MHz frontside bus frequency, the SiS661FX. But since the part won't ship in volume until August, with mobo availability in September, it's possible a rival will get a similar product out the door first.
SiS' chipset provides single-channel 400MHz DDR SDRAM support. It also offers an AGP 8x graphics card bus, over which its DirectX 9-compatible graphics core operates. The graphics core contains two pixel rendering pipelines and can apply four textures per cycle. LCD resolutions of up to 1600x1200 are supported, but CRTs can be supported at up to 2048x1536. The chipset provides TV-out, and dual-screen output. John Hsuan, SiS' chairman, recently said the company may consider using ATI graphics cores in its integrated chipsets, leading to the possibility that ATI technology is powering the SiS661FX's graphics. SiS simply refers to the core as a "Real256E". Its graphics subsidiary, Xabre, has yet to announce a DirectX 9 core.
SiS' HyperStreaming technology is used to connect the North Bridge to the South. The latter, the SiS964, supports Serial ATA with RAID 0, 1 and JBOD; two ATA 133 channels; 10/100 Ethernet; 56kbps modem; six-channel AC97 sound; eight USB 2.0 ports; and an integrated PS/2 mouse/keyboard controller. ®
News source: The Reg
