Peter: "Summing it up, we can foresee a real massacre in the Low-End Socket A chipsets sector. Thriving prospects, how do you think? Apprehensions are caused only by the probable troubles SIS may have with shipping proper quantities of chipsets to the mainboards manufacturers, as it used to happened. Maybe, this time SIS will be able to skirt the trouble."
Thanks for the link...
SiS is not the company it used to be - good or bad. It has had to contend with multiple lawsuits, as well as developing its own process technology (or adapting the technology it stole, according to some) and ramping its own fab. In fact, SiS is still under investigation by the U.S. International Trade Commission regarding a UMC claim that it is in violation of several UMC patents.
All in all, I'm not sure SiS is quite ready, as a company, yet. Longer term, the company definitely looks to be going places. A few recent events in SiS history:
Mar. 8,2001: SiS Announces Patent Cross-licensing Agreement with Intel
Mar. 6,2001: SiS Announces Patent Cross-licensing Agreement with IBM
Dec. 21,2000 SiS Holds Groundbreaking Ceremony for its State-of-the-Art 300-mm Wafer Fab and R/D Center in Tainan Science-based Industrial Park
SiS has also recently made some noise in the low-end graphics market, by developing a T&L-enabled, DDR-SDRAM capable graphics card: sis.com.tw
This could be an advantage when it comes to integrated graphics, although it is worth mentioning that SiS has adopted a slightly different approach to integrated chipsets than the other companies. Instead of integrating the graphics chip, SiS has elected to integrate the North and South Bridge (including USB, audio and ethernet).
Ok, that wound up sounding like a SiS PR ;)... not my intention, I can assure you. Certainly, SiS seems to be the more aggressive chipset company, but they haven't yet proved that they can actually pull anything off. As Bitboys Oy have so generously demonstrated, anyone can make great claims on paper - the problem lies in actually bringing the product to market.
The recent IBM and Intel licensing deals may just have enabled SiS to focus on this most important aspect (bringing the product to market) - time will tell...
-fyo |
