When faster CPUs are built, Silicon Integrated Systems Corp. says, it'll have chipsets for them. The Taiwan-based company universally known as SiS has announced a motherboard chipset for AMD's forthcoming 64-bit "Hammer" platform, and what it calls the first Intel Pentium 4 chipset on the market to support dual-channel DDR333 memory.

The SiS 755 is a fast, powerful, and affordable solution for high-end systems using AMD's forthcoming Athlon 64 and Opteron processors with HyperTransport interface for bandwidth of up to 6.4GB/sec. Paired with the SiS 963 South Bridge peripheral interface, the chipset offers 10/100Mbps Ethernet, dual ATA/133/100/66 IDE channels, 5.1-channel AC97 2.2 audio, HomePNA 2.0 phoneline networking, six PCI slots, and six USB 2.0/1.1 ports, as well as AGP 8X.

The SiS 655 is an AGP 8X core logic chipset designed to optimize the 533MHz-bus Pentium 4 platform, with a dual-channel DDR333 memory controller that doubles memory bandwidth (up to 5.4GB in advanced 128-bit mode and concurrent 2x64-bit mode) and support for Intel's Hyper-Threading technology. It too is paired with the SiS 963 South Bridge, which provides an IEEE 1394a connector, USB 2.0, and dual ATA/133/100/66 channels.

Both new chipsets use SiS' MuTIOL 1G technology, a proprietary data-bandwidth solution with bidirectional 16-bit data bus at 533MHz operating speed, allowing a seamless link between North Bridge and South Bridge components with transfer speed of 1GB/sec.