Silicon Integrated Systems (SiS) recently made a few changes in its chipset roadmap, adjusting its business plans to market realities, the company said. According to SiS, the company has separated the SiS671 and SiS771 northbridges, which respectively target the Intel and AMD desktop platforms, from each other by timeframes. SiS previously planned to make both chipsets available in samples in August, and volume production was scheduled to start in October. Now, the company pushed the SiS771 chip schedule forward, with sample availability scheduled for July. Its volume production, as planned, will start in October, SiS said.

According to the updated roadmap, the SiS671 northbridge now follows the SiS771, being one month behind in both sampling and volume production phases. Samples of the SiS671 will be available in August, as previously scheduled, but the product will reach mass production in November to be closer to the expected launch of Windows Vista operating system, SiS explained. Both the SiS671 and SiS771 chips are designed to utilize an 110nm manufacturing process, and they also incorporate the Mirage 3 graphics core that supports DirectX 9. According to SiS, integrated chipsets represent its main focus in 2006, contributing more than 80% of the company's chipset revenues, and next year, the contribution is expected to be about the same.

On the server side, SiS again confirmed that it has no plans to design chipsets for Intel Xeon processors, being purely concentrated on the AMD Opteron platform. As opposed to earlier claims, the company said that its first server northbridge, the SiS761SX, is already in volume production. However, so far, SiS only has reference boards based on this northbridge, and the company does not actually expect SiS761SX-based server motherboards to hit the market before January 2007. By that time, the company should already have another server northbridge, the SiS771SX, in mass production, according to the roadmap.

The SiS761SX is currently paired with the SiS966 southbridge on reference boards, and SiS hopes to get AMD's validation for the reference design in the near future. Moving to its second product, the company plans to change the integrated graphics core from Mirage 1 (DirectX 7) to Mirage 3, and manufacturing technology will migrate from 150nm to 110nm. Customer samples of the SiS771SX are currently scheduled to appear in August, and mass production will start in the fourth quarter, according to SiS

By: DocMemory
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