SIS replaces ATI in Intel chipset market

INTEL is still making ATI-based motherboards but this will end by the time 2007 arrives.

Newegg still has D102GGC2 board in stock listed for just less than $70 a piece. It calls it Intel D102GGC2 Socket T (LGA 775) ATI Radeon Xpress 200 Micro ATX Intel Motherboard - OEM. The last time we mentioned the board, was here.

It is based on RC410 Northbridge and SB450 Southbridge and is the last ATI board for Intel, probably forever.

Intel brings an alternative the board codenamed Little valley which is based on SIS' 662 chipset. The chipset supports Pentium Ds and Core 2 Duo CPUs, DDR 2 667 memory and FSB 800 only. It has a SIS 307 DirectX 7 integrated graphic and a PCIe 16X slot. The integrated graphics is also known as Mirage and has two pipelines. The board will end up branded as D201GLY and it is made in mini ITX format.

The board is set to arrive in Q2 2007.

This is a second important victory for plucky little SIS. First it did it with Xbox Southbridge and now it managed to get the deal with mighty Intel.

VIA and Nvidia are nowhere, as yet. We'renot sure what did they do to deserve it but as far as we can remember Nvidia cancelled its C60 Intel low-end chipset last year and never made a replacement. And Intel is still upset with VIA, I guess. µ