- Sunday, 22 November 2009
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Americans generally do the right thing, after first exhausting all the available alternatives - Winston Spencer Churchill
SiS chipset powers a half-litre nettop
LITTLE SIS, the once-budding chipset maker, has scored a design win with Lenovo, based on its Pegatron Ultra Slim Atom fanless ODM design.
It has accomplished this by pitching a two year old chipset design that was originally meant to power Core 2 Duo systems.
Under the hood of the the Lenovo Q100, a 0.5L "green PC" that happens to look like the bastard offspring of a Cylon and an Eee Box PC, you'll find a mix-and-match of chips - a SiS672 northbridge, a SiS868 southbridge and a 307DV companion video chip. This includes SiS Mirage 3 DX9 graphics certified for Windows 7. The chipset is driven by an Atom N230 processor, which makes it a nettop.
Triple-chip solutions are hardly power-efficient, but this plays back to the fact that the company hasn't done anything really new in the PC chipset arena since August 2007, when it actually, erm, launched this chipset.
So, will it play Crysis? Well... it'll play the slideshow version of the game.
Will it perform better than the *ugh* GMA500 graphics on Atom? Definitely.
Will it save more power than Intel's 945GSE? Probably not, but if it did, that would just prove our point.
In other words, SiS has a two year old design that's shaping up as a much cheaper alternative to both Intel's and Nvidia's chipsets for the Atom processor, with performance somewhere in between.
This just proves how crap nettop PC chipset design actually is in this day and age.
Ironically, the company did make a rather ominous statement that it will only support the chipset until 2011, which leaves us wondering if SiS will have any PC chipset business left at all, after that. µ
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"Ironically, the company did make a rather ominous statement that it will only support the chipset until 2011.."
That's really stupid of SiS to say this. It's like they're actually telling OEMs not to use this chip. Or are they coming up with something new?
This makes me remember the times of Socket A where the chip SIS 745 hit on the market as a better-than-VIA and cheaper-than-nforce alternative. I personally got the SiS 748 that came later on.
It was cool on temps, it didnt have those stupid incompatibility problems that VIA had with some ATI AGP cards, and was cheaper than nforce2-based motherboards, without sacrifying performance too much. It was overall a really good value. The SiS 741GX was almost exactly the same chipset but it included integrated graphics.
Of course it lacked dual channel but back in those times, dual channel did little for improving performance, maybe because the socket A platform was being the limitant here.
Then, later on, SiS started to dissappear slowly from the market. Not sure why.. but I remember another good chipset for Athlon 64 and something similar for the Intel platforms, and that was all.
The last time I saw a SiS chipset live was this Sis 672 in a MSI core 2 duo laptop, which I serviced, and I concluded that it was very good, but the Mirage 3+ IGP was quite inferior to intel GMA4500 and 3100.
But for those who slowly die in an office everyday, eating excell numbers or writing dadaism poetry in Word, will appreciate this chipset a lot. It simply works, cool and pretty fast, and for the price, we should start thinking about it.
I just checked MSI laptops and there is a brand new model, including this Sis chipset, a core 2 duo T6800 and as candy, an ATI 3430. I think I will give it a go. Definitely.
Dell is using SIS chipset on a nettop for a long time:
http://www1.la.dell.com/br/pt/empresa/Computadores/desktop-optiplex-160/pd.aspx?refid=desktop-optiplex-160&s=bsd&cs=brbsdt1