Intel's Penryn dual and quad-core processors will mean a good opportunity for third party chipset makers, next year. The only competition, until now, came from nVidia, which mostly targeted the performance and mainstream segments. ATI has almost vanished from the map, with products still coming from DFI but not for a long time. And then, you have VIA, that supports Core 2 and offers good entry-level systems (AsRock, for example). It's this particular market segement that SiS will cater in Q4’2007.

SiS plans to sell both single-chip and dual-chip chipsets for Penryn. The single-chip family consists of:

- 680SCD. 1333 MHz front-side bus, support for DDR2-800 and 1066 MHz memory.
- 680SCP. 1333 MHz front-side bus, DDR2-800.
- 680SCL. 1066 MHz front-side bus, DDR2-800.
- 680SCE. 1333 MHz front-side bus, Mirage 4 graphics core.
- 680SCH. 1066 MHz front-side bus, Mirage 4 graphics core.

(*) Mirage 4 graphics core: HDCP compliant for Blu-ray and HD DVD video playback, DirectX 10, H.264 and VC-1 acceleration.

All SiS 680-series chipsets support a single PCIe x16 slot, four PCIe x1 slots, ten USB 2.0, four SATA 3.0 Gbps ports and Gigabit Ethernet. They use the same pin-outs and are drop-in compatible. We expect them to be very cheap.

In the first half of 2008 SiS is to begin sampling the dual-chip versions, but unless they turn out to be a surprise in the performance area, no enthusiast looking for a dual PCIe x16 slot motherboard will take them seriously.

Link: DailyTech.

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