News Release

2001/8/9

SiS645 - Pioneers the New Era of Pentium®4 Chipset

~ SiS showcases the world's first DDR333-supporting, open architecture chipset for Pentium® 4 with SiS proprietary MuTIOL® technology to provide peak bandwidth up to 533MB/s between the North and South Bridge ~

Taipei, Taiwan, 23rd August, 2001 - Silicon Integrated Systems Corp. (SiS), a leading core logic and graphics supplier, today launched the first leg of SiS645 press conference series in Taipei (followed by Beijing, Tokyo and Munich at a later date) for its legitimate Pentium® 4- compliant chipset - SiS645. The SiS645 features unprecedented high performance, full compatibility and low power consumption. It adopts independent south bridge and north bridge design (SiS645/SiS961). The SiS645 is the world's first P4 chipset supporting high speed DDR333 interface and with the company's proprietary MuTIOL® technology, it can provide peak bandwidth up to 553MB/s between the north and south bridge. SiS645 will be produced in SiS' own fab with advanced process and scheduled to commence volume shipment from September.

"In time of the fast transition of CPU generations, we are aware of the tremendous challenge and competition we and our customers have to face. Products with high performance, time to the market, attractive add-on values and competitive pricing are all necessary conditions. With years of technological capabilities, supported by our own advanced wafer fabrication, SiS has successfully rolled out this new chipset in time for the booming P4 market, " said Alex Wu, Director of IPD of SiS, "We are confident that SiS645 to be the leader in its spec, performance and cost. It's a sure thing that SiS645 will bring prosperous business to all our customers, both OEMs and motherboard makers."

The SiS645 supports DDR333/DDR266/PC133 memory module with up to 3GB memory size. By using DDR, SiS645 can fully exploit the performance of P4 CPU based system for the end users. It also supports the new generation of 400MHz front side bus as well as AGP4X/2X. The companion South bridge, SiS961 integrates various of multimedia functions, such as 5.1 channel AC'97 2.2 audio, 10/100 MB Ethernet, V.90 software modem, Home PNA 2.0, ATA100/66/33 standard IDE interface, 6 PCI slots and 6 USB hosts.

To fully optimize P4-based system performance, DDR333 is definitely the best choice for memory interface. DDR333 has been endorsed and supported by many DRAM makers:

"We are delighted to see SiS introducing the first Pentium® 4, DDR333-supporting core logic chipset. With DDR333, users can enjoy faster and higher performance, especially working under multi-tasks," said Hidemori Inukai, Board Director and General Manager of Elpida Memory, Inc. " We believe DDR333 will soon become the mainstream in the market and Elpida will surely provide DDR333 to the market in a timely manner."

"Infineon is committed to continually bringing higher-value products to the market," said Axel Hahn, Senior Director of Product Marketing at Infineon's Memory Products Group. "With all our DRAM products manufactured in 0.17£gm technology, we are perfectly able to support faster speed variants of existing DRAM architectures as the industry readies its support infrastructure. We welcome the SiS645/961 chipset and its landmark achievement, the support for the DDR333 speed grade. Infineon will be among the leaders to supply DDR333 memories just as we have been at the forefront of suppliers offering DDR266 memories."

"DDR memory technology has been established as the next step in the memory technology. The enhanced performance of the DDR333 speed grades being introduced late this year and early next year will give yet another advantage to the customer. These cost effective solutions provide a 30% bandwidth improvement that is particularly useful for integrated north bridge (north bridge + graphic engine) applications. These systems take direct benefit of added memory bandwidth, irrelevant of the process FSB speed." said Mike Seibert, Micron Technology CCG Strategic Marketing Manager.

" DDR333 memory devices are used on PC2700 memory modules that provide a peak throughput of 2.7GB per second. Compared with DDR266, it not only can greatly increase system performance by 30% of peak throughput but also is backward compatible with DDR266. With its cost effective and performance advantage, and the launch of SiS645, DDR333 will quickly be adopted as a mainstream memory product in the near future. Today, Nanya Technology Corp. is ready to deliver DDR333 in volume with 0.175um process technology." said Charles Kau, Executive Vice President of Strategic Marketing & Global Sales of Nanya Technology Corp..

" Samsung Electronics Co. Ltd. is committed to leading the DDR333 SDRAM market and is working to pave the way for the availability of high-performance DDR technology for the server, workstation and high-performance desktop PC markets," said Jon Kang, Senior Vice President of Memory Product Planning and Application of SEC. " With today's availability of DDR333 SDRAM for both 128Mb and 256Mb, Samsung is ready to support the growing demand for high performance DDR products and happy to participate with SiS in the introduction of world first DDR333 PC platforms."

" With DDR333, the overall system performance will be largely enhanced. For DDR333, there is industry-wide recognized specification from JEDEC. Vanguard will aggressively support DDR333." said Paul Chien, General Manager of Vanguard International Semiconductor Corporation.

The SiS645 target at US$1000 ~ 1500 mainstream PC market and is priced at US$35 for 10K order.