Date:
Wednesday, July 31, 2002
Author:
Kyle Bennett
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SiS 648 Preview

A very quick look at what the new SiS chipset can do for the Pentium 4. Surprisingly, it can do a hell of a lot even compared to the i850E packing PC1066 Rambus.

We are about a week overdue on this "PREview" as other responsibilities simply got the best of us, but rest assured that this SiS chipset is worth talking about. In fact, I think this is the best product I have seen out of SiS to date. The SiS 648 is a natural evolution in the 64X line of SiS chipsets, but this one sits a bit higher in the saddle than the rest.

Let's look at what support it brings to the table when coupled with the SiS 693 southbridge.

Key Features:

Article Image

Features

Benefits

CPU supported

Intel PentiumŪ 4 CPU.

DDR333/DDR266/200

support

Support Maximum Memory Bandwidth 2.7GB/s.

MuTIOL 1GŪ technology

Proprietary Interconnect between SiS648 and SiS963.SiS MuTIOL 1GŪ deliver 1GB/s bandwidth.

8X AGP upgrade flexibility

Make system performance upgrade and user's facilitation.Support Maximum AGP interface bandwidth 2.1GB/s.Backwards compatible with AGP 4X.

ATA133 enhancement

Fastest storage support. Increasing data/file transfer rate.

AC97 Controller

Hollywood 3D stereo enriches audio surrounding with up to six channels.

H/W DVD accelerator with MC, IDCT and VLD enhancement

High performance and smooth DVD playback. H/W accelerator saves CPU utilization.

ACR(Advanced Communications Riser) card support

Allow multiple configurations on a single card to extend USB, LAN, HomePNA, modem, and audio for greater flexibility. Compatible to PCI with minimum design changes.

Integrated Communication Controller for LAN or HPNA use

MII interface used for 10/100Mbps LAN or 1/10Mbps HomePNA function. Reaching cost-effective solution and design elasticity.

Integrated USB2.0 Controllers

Support Serial Bus Data Rates of 100, 200, and 400 Mbps.

Integrated IEEE 1394 HostController

Two controllers for six ports, achieving real legacy free systems.

The features that are most notable are of course the DDR333 support and AGP8X. USB 2.0 and Firewire are nothing to sneeze at either but integrations such as this are almost expected now days.

While AGP8X really means noting much to us now in terms of need, it has shown to give you a couple of extra points in the benchmarks should you have an AGP8X compliant card which there are about to be more of on the market besides the SiS Xabre cards. Keep in mind though that as more advanced games such at DOOM]|[ and Quake4 start to appear next year, we are told that the AGP8X transfer rates of 2GBs will be needed to deliver smooth frame rates.

Now, on to the benchmarks.