Computex 2002 Day 1 - Part II: KT400, Dual Channel DDR & More

SiS 658 - The First 850 Competitor

You've probably heard about it for a while but we were finally able to get an up close and personal look at the first RDRAM Pentium 4 chipset not to be produced by Intel. The SiS 658 is a dual-channel RDRAM solution for the Pentium 4 with official support for the 533MHz FSB and PC1066 RDRAM (something the 850E lacks). Unofficial support for PC1200 RDRAM will be provided. The 658 North Bridge also supports AGP 8X and will be shipping in Q4 of this year.

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The 658 North Bridge will most likely be paired with the new SiS 963 South Bridge. The 963 features integrated USB 2.0 and IEEE-1394 controllers for the most flexible I/O support of any South Bridge.

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The SiS 648 was also on display; for those of you that aren't familiar with the chipset, the 648 is basically SiS' 645 Pentium 4 chipset but with AGP 8X support. Although the chipset was supposed to be running a DDR400 demo, the memory was running at DDR333 speeds because of stability issues.

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