DX10 SIS flashes
SIS IS ONE of those companies that does a good job plugging away in the background and seemingly never gets any credit for its work. The plucky firm tends to do a really good job in the market segment it targets, the low end.
SIS has a very compelling roadmap for its segment though, and it shared it with me at Computex.
First off, a little SIS code, if you see a north bridge with the number six, ie 6xx, it is an Intel part. Seven, as in 7xx connotes AMD. SIS offers a range of products, each a variant on a central theme, with parts added or removed to meet cost and power targets.
The technology SIS supports tends to lag the bleeding edge a bit, but for its markets, it seems to be timed about right for affordability. The north bridge tech it is going to use starts out with DDR 3 in early 2007, but still supports DDR2 for a long time to come. PCIe2 will be there in 2008, and 802.11n theoretically shows up later this year, assuming the spec is there. Overall, quite sensible.
On the embedded graphics side, this is low-cost remember, the current core is the Mirage 3, basically a DX9 part that does PS2.0 but not VS at all. It will support 256MB of memory, and play most of the games a low-end PC will be asked to. Towering frame rates in F.E.A.R. it will not have, but it does have a lot of media and video functionality like smoothing, 3:2 and 2:2 pulldown, and some MPEG2 acceleration.
The Mirage 4 graphics core will again not vault it into the lead, but it will be enough to run all the flavours of Vista fast enough to get the job done. It is a DX10 part, and has all the features of it's predecessor, along with a handful of improvements. The most notable is the DRM infected Display Port and other evil rights removal mechanisms. Look for this part in early 2007, it should do what it is meant to do, at a reasonable cost.