Silicon Integrated Systems (SiS) is making inroads into the AMD chipset market and will increase its efforts by releasing a number of PCI Express (PCIe) chipsets for the AMD K8 platform, beginning in November, according to the company. SiS claims it ranks second in market share in both the Intel and AMD chipset market, and its goal is to become the number-one producer of AMD chipsets. Currently, VIA is the market leader in the AMD segment.

In September, SiS announced that NEC and Hewlett-Packard (HP) would market AMD K8 products featuring the company's chipsets. Both HP and NEC will bundle the integrated SiS760 with their consumer PCs.

According to the company, its revenues are expected to grow 10% sequentially in September due to increased sales of K8 chipsets to PC OEMs.

In November, SiS will begin volume production of its discrete PCIe-enabled 761 north bridge, which will feature one PCIe x16 lane. The761GS, a version featuring integrated graphics, will follow in the first quarter of next year. The company will also introduce two more integrated parts in the second quarter of next year, the 770 and 756FX, with volume production coming in the third quarter.

The 761GX and 756FX will feature SiS' Mirage1 graphics, which support DirectX7, while the 770 will use the Mirage3 core, which supports DirectX9.

According to SiS, the 756FX will also support two PCIe express graphics cards. In addition to supporting Nvidia's SLI (scalable link interface) solution, SiS claims it is developing a part that will support ATI PCIe cards.

SiS will partner its PCIe north bridges with the 965 I/O controller. The 965 features two PCIe x1 lanes, integrated RAID and Gigabit Ethernet, and supports four SATA ports.

SiS' November launch of its PCIe chipsets will come one month after VIA begins volume production of its VIA K8T890 chipset. Nvidia and ATI are also expected to release PCIe chipsets for the AMD platform in the fourth quarter.

Source: www.digitimes.com