SiS - License With Intel Secure
We talked with SiS today and asked them about the rumors that continue to wind around the Internet saying that they are going to lose their Pentium 4 license from Intel. While of course they can't discuss specifics of the current situation with Intel, they did say that SiS enjoys a good working relationship with Intel and hopes to continue to work them them in the future. And, the current agreement that they have in place does cover all of the P4 products that they currently have. Intel is pushing its own chipsets aggressively with vendors, so in a tight market we can expect a lot of jockeying for position. We'll have to wait and see how the dynamics of a tough economic climate impact Intel's licensing whims next year.
In other news, the R658 board from SiS is still in development. They contiunue to work on tweaking the performance of the board. We were told that it is still on track and you should be able to look for this board soon. In related news, it has been pretty well confirmed that at least two OEMs will be offering motherboards that will be based on the R658 chipset. Rambus' future in desktop PCs might in fact weigh heavily on the success of this new chipset. As we explained at IDF, it will be very intresting to see what kind of performance is possible with this solution verses the other new solutions that are arriving.
From what we could tell the R658 reference board that you see here in the picture has not changed much from IDF. Still no exact word beyond "soon" on how much longer we will have to wait to get our hands on this baord for testing.
The new 648 chipset from SiS.
SiS, like pretty much all of the other chipset vendors, already has a "Hammer" board ready to go. Here is a close up of the SiS hammer motherboard solution.
