SiS 648 - Taking Advantage of the P4 Situation

The Most Feature filled South Bridge since nForce

The 648 North Bridge will be paired up with the new 963 South Bridge from SiS. The 963 is identical to the 962 South Bridge in its feature set, which includes dual ATA/133 IDE controllers, support for up to 6 USB 2.0 ports, integrated Ethernet MAC, AC’97 audio support and a 3-port IEEE-1394 (Firewire) controller. Only NVIDIA’s MCP-T can surpass the 963 in terms of features however, there won’t be any NVIDIA powered P4 chipsets anytime soon.

Just like SiS’ previous chipsets, the North and South Bridge are linked using their own Multithreaded I/O Link (MuTIOL) technology. MuTIOL is SiS’ answer to Intel’s Hub Architecture and VIA’s V-Link, a serial interconnect between the North and South Bridges.

The 963 South Bridge only differs from its predecessor in that the MuTIOL bandwidth has been increased from 533MB/s up to 1GB/s. The PCI, Firewire, USB and IDE devices running off of the 963 South Bridge won’t even come close to saturating the old 533MB/s link so the increase in MuTIOL bandwidth won’t be the cause of any noticeable performance boosts.