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The third incarnation of the Silicon Integrated Systems (SIS) DDR chipset for the Intel Pentium4 finally got a new name instead of a suffix: SIS 648 where the last digit signifies the new AGP 3.0 compliant x8 interface with 2.0 GB/sec bandwidth. A revamped SouthBridge with increased connectivity for USB 2.0, 3-port IEEE 1394 firewire and ATA133 endorsement offers enough bandwidth hogs to warrant an upgrade of the Multi I/O Link (MuTIOL) interconnect from 533 to 1066 MB/sec bandwidth. Overall, the new chipset convinces with blazing fast performance in the same league as any PC1066 Rambus system, even though we found a few issues, primarily with the ATA interface that need to be resolved before the chipset becomes a undisputedly viable platform.

Earlier this week, the NDA on the latest incarnation of SIS chipset for the Intel Pentium4 platform expired. If there had been a gradual advancement of features from the SIS 645 to the SIS 645DX that consisted mostly of adding support for the 533 MHz FSB of the latest Intel P4 processors, the new kid on the block is substantially enough different to deserve its own, distinguished name: SIS 648

SIS 648, featuring MuTIOL, DBI, AGPx8, DDR266/333/400* support

To keep this as brief as possible, what are the key features that have changed from the older siblings? Some of the changes were crouching tigers in earlier revisions meaning that they were already in place and functional in the SIS645/DX. Within this category, we have semi-official support for DDR400 which is nice but then, we have been running at that speed for months now anyway and broke a few speed records on the way.

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