Silicon Integrated Systems
Silicon Integrated Systems (SiS; ) is a company that manufactures, among other things, motherboard chipsets. The company was founded in 1987 in Hsinchu Science Park, Taiwan. Business. In the late 1990s, SiS made the decision to invest in their own chip fabrication facilities. At the end of 1999, SiS acquired Rise Technology and its mP6 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- and VLB-buses. Mainboards using this chipset and equipped with CPUs such as the Intel  80486DX4, AMD 5x86 or Cyrix Cx5x86 processors had performance and compatibility comparable with early Intel Pentium systems in addition to a lower price. 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-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. The SiS 530 (Sindbad) with SiS 5595 southbridge supported Socket 7, SDRAM 1.5GB max., a bus frequency from 66 MHz to 124 MHz, and can have from 2 to 8 MiB 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 competitors, such as the AMD K6 series or Cyrix 6x86. The graphics controller had Direct3D 6.0 and OpenGL support, although it was  a very low-performance product for 3D acceleration. Pentium (Socket 4,5,7). SiS 540 (Spartan) integrates SiS 300 graphics controller. Socket 478, Socket 775. SiS and ALi were the only two companies initially awarded licenses to produce third party chipsets for the Pentium 4. 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 940, 754, 939, AM2. Memory support is dependent on the CPU SiS created a multimedia chipset for the Xbox 360. 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 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. Integrated 3D Graphics. 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.