Silicon Integrated Systems (SiS; ) is a company that manufactures, among other things, motherboard chipsets. The company was founded in 1987 in

Hsinchu Science Park The Hsinchu Science Park (HSP; ) is an industrial park established by the government of Taiwan on 15 December 1980. It straddles Hsinchu City and Hsinchu County in Taiwan. History The idea of the establishment of the Hsinchu Science Park was f ...

Taiwan Taiwan, officially the Republic of China (ROC), is a country in East Asia, at the junction of the East and South China Seas in the northwestern Pacific Ocean, with the People's Republic of China (PRC) to the northwest, Japan to the no ...

Business

In the late 1990s, SiS made the decision to invest in their own chip

fabrication Fabrication may refer to: * Manufacturing, specifically the crafting of individual parts as a solo product or as part of a larger combined product. Processes in arts, crafts and manufacturing * Semiconductor device fabrication, the process used ...

facilities. At the end of 1999, SiS acquired

Rise Technology Rise Technology was a short lived microprocessor manufacturer that produced the Intel x86 MMX compatible mP6 processor. The mP6 was a microprocessor that was designed to perform a smaller number of types of computer instructions so that it can ...

and its

mP6 The Rise mP6 was a superpipelined and superscalar microprocessor designed by Rise Technology to compete with the Intel Pentium line. History Rise Technology had spent 5 years developing a x86 compatible microprocessor, and finally introduced i ...

x86 core technology.

Mainboard chipsets

One of the most famous chipsets produced by SiS was the late 486-age chipset 496/497 which supported PCI bus among older

ISA Isa or ISA may refer to: Places * Isa, Amur Oblast, Russia * Isa, Kagoshima, Japan * Isa, Nigeria * Isa District, Kagoshima, former district in Japan * Isa Town, middle class town located in Bahrain * Mount Isa, Queensland, Australia * Mount ...

- and VLB-buses. Mainboards using this chipset and equipped with CPUs such as the Intel 80486DX4, AMD 5x86 or

Cyrix Cx5x86 The Cyrix 5x86 was a line of x86 microprocessors designed by Cyrix and released on June 5 of 1995. Cyrix, being a fabless company, had the chips manufactured by IBM. The line came out about 5 months before the more famous Cyrix 6x86. The Cyri ...

processors had performance and compatibility comparable with early Intel

Pentium Pentium is a brand used for a series of x86 architecture-compatible microprocessors produced by Intel. The original Pentium processor from which the brand took its name was first released on March 22, 1993. After that, the Pentium II and P ...

systems in addition to a lower price. ROCKY-518HV - SiS5598-2376

After this late success, SiS continued positioning itself as a budget chipset producer. The company emphasized high integration to minimize the cost to implement their solutions. As such, SiS one-chip mainboard chipsets that included integrated video, such as the

Socket 7 Socket 7 is a physical and electrical specification for an x86-style CPU socket on a personal computer motherboard. It was released in June 1995. The socket supersedes the earlier Socket 5, and accepts P5 Pentium microprocessors manufactured by ...

-based SiS 5596, SiS 5598, and SiS 530 along with the Slot 1-based SiS 620. These were some of the first PC chipsets with such high integration. They allowed entire system solutions to be built with just a mainboard, system RAM, and a CPU.

386 & 486 (Socket 1, 2, 3)

* SiS 310,320,330 "Rabbit" * SiS 401/402 ISA * SiS 406/411 EISA, Vesa Local Bus * SiS 460 ISA, Vesa Local Bus * SiS 461 ISA, Vesa Local Bus * SiS 471 ISA, Vesa Local Bus * SiS 496/497 ISA, VLB, PCI

Pentium (Socket 4,5,7)

*SiS 501/502/503 ISA, PCI *SiS 5511/5512/5513 ISA, PCI *SiS 5571 ISA, PCI *SiS 5581/5582 ISA, PCI *SiS 5591/5595 ISA, PCI, AGP The SiS 530 (Sindbad) with SiS 5595 southbridge supported

SDRAM Synchronous dynamic random-access memory (synchronous dynamic RAM or SDRAM) is any DRAM where the operation of its external pin interface is coordinated by an externally supplied clock signal. DRAM integrated circuits (ICs) produced from the ...

1.5GB max., a bus frequency from 66 MHz to 124 MHz, and can have from 2 to 8

MiB The byte is a unit of digital information that most commonly consists of eight bits. Historically, the byte was the number of bits used to encode a single character of text in a computer and for this reason it is the smallest addressable unit ...

shared memory for an integrated AGP SiS 6306 2D/3D graphics controller. Includes integrated UDMA66 IDE controller. mainboards using the SiS 530 were positioned as cheap office platforms and paired often with low-cost chips from

Intel Intel Corporation is an American multinational corporation and technology company headquartered in Santa Clara, California. It is the world's largest semiconductor chip manufacturer by revenue, and is one of the developers of the x86 ser ...

competitors, such as the

AMD K6 Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. (AMD) is an American multinational semiconductor company based in Santa Clara, California, that develops computer processors and related technologies for business and consumer markets. While it initially manufactur ...

series or

Cyrix 6x86 The Cyrix 6x86 is a line of sixth-generation, 32-bit x86 microprocessors designed and released by Cyrix in 1995. Cyrix, being a fabless company, had the chips manufactured by IBM and SGS-Thomson. The 6x86 was made as a direct competitor to In ...

. The graphics controller had

Direct3D Direct3D is a graphics application programming interface (API) for Microsoft Windows. Part of DirectX, Direct3D is used to render three-dimensional graphics in applications where performance is important, such as games. Direct3D uses hardware ...

6.0 and

OpenGL OpenGL (Open Graphics Library) is a cross-language, cross-platform application programming interface (API) for rendering 2D and 3D vector graphics. The API is typically used to interact with a graphics processing unit (GPU), to achieve hardwa ...

support, although it was a very low-performance product for 3D acceleration. SiS 540 (Spartan) integrates SiS 300 graphics controller.

Socket 370, Slot 1

* SiS 600/SiS 5595 * SiS 620/SiS 5595 * SiS 630 - includes North- and South bridges (SiS 960) and 2D/3D graphics controller (SiS 305) on one chip * SiS 633 * SiS 635

Socket 478, Socket 775

SiS and ALi were the only two companies initially awarded licenses to produce third party chipsets for the

Pentium 4 Pentium 4 is a series of single-core CPUs for desktops, laptops and entry-level servers manufactured by Intel. The processors were shipped from November 20, 2000 until August 8, 2008. The production of Netburst processors was active from 2000 ...

. SiS developed the 648 chipset with this license (SiS 648 B Stepping supports Intel Hyper-Threading CPU on some motherboards like MSI 648 Max).

Socket A (Socket 462), Slot A

Socket 940, 754, 939, AM2

Memory support is dependent on the CPU SiS created a multimedia chipset for the

Xbox 360 The Xbox 360 is a home video game console developed by Microsoft. As the successor to the original Xbox, it is the second console in the Xbox series. It competed with Sony's PlayStation 3 and Nintendo's Wii as part of the seventh generati ...

Southbridge chips

Paired with later SiS chipsets, such as the 661GX/761GX, which adopt a standard two-chip chipset design (instead of single-chip, like the older

SiS 630/730 The SiS 630 and SiS 730 are a family of highly integrated chipsets for Intel ( Slot 1/Socket 370) and AMD ( Slot A/ Socket A) respectively. At the time of release they were unique in that they not only provided VGA, Audio, LAN, IDE and USB function ...

series chipsets). SiS southbridges can handle IDE, LAN (accompanied by a PHY chip), audio (with an AC'97 codec), along with other types of I/O. SiS' proprietary MuTIOL interconnect connects the southbridge chip to the northbridge, which contains the RAM controller (for chipsets targeted at Intel platforms) and interfaces with the CPU.

Graphics chipsets

* SiS 6201 * SiS 6202 * SiS 6205 * SiS 6215 * SiS 6225 * SiS 6306 * SiS 6326 * SiS 300 * SiS 301 * SiS 305 * SiS 315 * SiS 320 (Xabre 80) * SiS 326 * SiS 330 (Mirage IGP) * SiS 340 (Xabre 200) * SiS 360 (Xabre 400) * SiS 380 (Xabre 600)

Discrete 3D Graphics chips

Integrated 3D Graphics

* ¹

Pixel shader In computer graphics, a shader is a computer program that calculates the appropriate levels of light, darkness, and color during the Rendering (computer graphics), rendering of a 3D scene - a process known as ''shading''. Shaders have evolved ...

vertex shaders In computer graphics, a shader is a computer program that calculates the appropriate levels of light, darkness, and color during the rendering of a 3D scene - a process known as '' shading''. Shaders have evolved to perform a variety of s ...

: texture mapping units: render output units Some cards contain a 3D graphics accelerator but it is only functional with the SiS's Proprietary Windows-only driver (the company does not provide documentation for others to write drivers). However, the Linux kernel includes a working third party driver that, while not supporting 3D gaming, makes the cards usable under Linux.

Touch-Screen chipsets

* SiS 9202 * SiS 9203 * SiS 9220P * SiS 9223 * SiS 9250 * SiS 9250H * SiS 9251 * SiS 9252 * SiS 9255 * SiS 9272 * SiS 9275 * SiS 9277

References

External links

* {{Electronics industry in Taiwan 1987 establishments in Taiwan Manufacturing companies based in Hsinchu Electronics companies established in 1987 Electronics companies of Taiwan Graphics hardware companies Semiconductor companies of Taiwan Taiwanese brands