This morning SiS, with partners Rambus, Samsung, and Asustek Computer officially announced the development of a new next generation chipset for the Pentium 4 platform to be called the R659. The R659 will be SiS's second offering featuring Rambus technology.

The R659 will incorporate the use of four channel 1200MHz Rambus using a new high speed Rambus memory controller. Using four channel 1200MHz Rambus the R659 should deliver 9.6GByte/sec of memory bandwidth as we reported in our IDF coverage. 9.6GByte/sec of memory bandwidth represents a 50% gain over competing dual-channel DDR chipsets. The R659 will also offer additional architectural enhancements which will allow for higher performance through faster response time, as well as capacity enhancements to allow for support of 16GB of system memory.

The R659 chipset will also support cutting edge performance using PC800 RIMMs that can be recycled from the systems that users have today. In addition the R659 will pair the SiSR659 with the SiS 964 south bridge, which will integrate support for up to 8 USB 2.0 ports and Serial ATA support. Delivery of samples of the SiS R659 are scheduled for the third quarter of 2003.