SIS shows off 754-939 pin motherboard

WE STOPPED BY THE SIS stand to chat to the chaps and to see what technology the firm was showing this year.

Hank Lee, manager of the firm's computing products division, first gave us a quick tour of the stand before filling us in on many of its chipset plans.

One board caught our attention because it was rotating slowly and seemed to be the oddest dual socket board we'd ever seen. In fact, this is a board made by Asrock to accommodate the folk who want to plug either a 754 pin Athlon XP or an Athlon 64 for 939 pins into a motherboard. That's because the change from one socket to another is always tricky. In passing, Dirk Meyer, senior VP at AMD, confirmed that when the K9 comes, it will have a different socket to 939 pins, yeah verily. Here's the Asrock board:

Don't forget that SIS has a licence for Intel's Pentium M and it has a design win in the shape of this machine from MSI. This baby will support DDR 400 up to 3GB, and uses the SIS Mirage graphics engine.

SIS makes chipsets for both AMD and Intel. In July it will go into production on the 656 Intel platform which supports dual channel. DDR2-666, PCI Express x 16. It will also make a single channel version of this chipset a bit later on.

Later this year, it will release an Intel chipset, the 656 FX which supports the 800MHz front side bus, and DDR-2 666. We asked Hank whether the firm will release a 1066MHz front side bus version of an Intel chipset, but he smiled slightly and explained that this was very a sensitive subject so he couldn't talk about it. That's probably a yes, then.

On the AMD front, SIS starts making PCI Express 754 pin chipset in July, as well as the 760GX, which supports both Athlon 64 and Athlon XP 754.

The 966, coming in October, will support a staggering 10 USB ports, S-ATA with AHCI (advanced host control interface), will have support for four PCI Express slots and because it's a south bridge chip, will be Intel-AMD agnostic.

Lastly, we've noticed that SIS always tries to be a little artistic and aesthetic on its stands. In September last year we were treated to Greek characters propping up pillars, and this time round we've a SIS ballerina who gracefully skips round the stage toting a transparent veil. Everyone we've ever met at SIS has always been unfailingly charming, we have to say.