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SiS645 P4 / DDR333 Preview

Some of you might be sitting around thinking that people like VIA and Intel rule the chipset world. Well, it was not too long ago that it was thought that only Intel could build a chipset. Silicon Integrated Systems is now building a Pentium4 DDR chipset and they have Intel's blessing.

Let's keep in mind that this is a chipset PREview, not a review of a board or a chipset. SiS has delivered to us a reference board that utilizes their 645 northbridge and 961 southbridge combination. There are two really big things worth mentioning here. First, this is another non-Intel DDR chipset for the Pentium4 CPU. Second, it is the first 333MHz DDR board we have been exposed to. Due to time constraints I would like to get right at the meat of the chipset.

 

Here is a quick overview of the features of the 645 chipset:

What we are seeing here is much akin to what we saw in the VIA P4X266 chipset. There is nothing groundbreaking besides the obvious P4/DDR relationship. Where it does differ greatly from the VIA chipset is that SiS is actually licensed by Intel to produce this chipset. You will not be seeing a lawsuit against SiS filed by Intel on this issue. It will still be fun to see if VIA sues SiS though, as they are claiming rights to some of the Pentium4 technology anyway!

Above, you will see the normal tree diagram of the chipset system architecture and what it supports. Again, there is nothing new outside the obvious DDR support, but if you look a bit closer, you will see something that is coming of age with many chipsets now days. In fact, there is no standard on this yet, so everyone has their own way of doing things. Quite simply, the northbridge and southbridge must have a way to exchange data, and SiS has improved over the usual PCI bus with what they call "MuTIOL".

MuTIOL is a 266MB/s bus that is bi-directional, meaning that 266MB of data can flow upstream and downstream at the same time. The MuTIOL bus also allows all southbridge components to share the bus at the same time, allowing it to reduce latencies. At least this is what we are told in theory, which is shown in the above slide. We are currently looking into better ways to test these new technologies.

To put all of this into a nutshell, the SiS645 delivers evolutionary DDR Ram support at a whopping speed of 166MHz and an advanced northbridge and southbridge interface bus. Now that we have the basics covered, let's see what the DDR333 is all about.

 

Here are a couple of quick shots of our KingMax Tiny BGA DDR333. You may not be familiar with this type of Ram, as it uses a Ball Grid Array package instead of traditional chips. The above diagram will give you some idea of how it is mounted, but it is done much the same way any chipset or the new S478 sockets are affixed to a PCB.

There is some debate in my mind as to the nature of the specification of this Ram. The Jedec organization has yet to officially specify DDR333/PC2700 parts. It can probably be best summed up that this is simply PC2100 spec Ram that is capable of running at PC2700 speed. 2700 = 2.7GB/s transfer rate. Here is a cut and paste on what KingMax has to say about their sticks of DDR333.

Double Data Rate (DDR) is an evolutionary high-bandwidth memory of the future. DDR, based on the current Single Data Rate (SDR) PC-100/133/266 SDRAM architecture, has evolved to be the next generation of SDRAM and drastically increases the performance the memory subsystem with whopping 2.7GB/sec peak bandwidth. And, DDR achieves the high bandwidth operating at a much lower core voltage of 2.5V. Extraordinary Cost/Performance Ratio and Cost/Megabit Ratio – unlike Direct Rambus’ high price tag - have made DDR the ideal memory solution for the next generation of high performance computing platforms. Furthermore, DDR has already gained wide industry supports from major chipset makers, platform developers, and DRAM manufacturers thus making DDR the inevitable choice of the next generation of 200MHz+ high bandwidth, cost-effective memory devices and memory modules for the Year 2001 and beyond. And Kingmax Semiconductor Inc. is able to yield 333MHz and grade DRAMs to meet the challenge of the escalating performance of processor. DDR-333 TinyBGA 184pin unbuffered DIMM is a cost-effective solution for the hard-core overclockers. Users get more performance/cost ratio. And every Kingmax DDR-333 DIMM is tested on an actual 333MHz platform and comes with a lifetime warranty.