Fifth vendor plans D3D10 accelerator, bullish about further markets
It's sometimes easy to forget that SiS are still there, beavering away on new products relentlessly and without the press or fanfare of others. Traditional suppliers of core logic for any socket and any platform, Silicon Integrated Systems are also happy to try their hand at a graphics chip every now and again.Their Mirage 3 core is a DX9 part found in mobile core logic for Intel and AMD processors alike. Featuring a pair of pixel shader units and four texture engines, the Mirage 3 isn't the pinnacle of performance, but it services a particular market quite well and SiS report it's selling well, and that refreshes for new CPUs are coming in late 2006.
To that end, they're trying their hand at D3D10 with the Mirage 4. Likely using a unified-on-silicon design given its low-power, small silicon mobile aspirations, Mirage 4 sees SiS as the fifth vendor to signal their PC D3D10 intentions, joining ATI, NVIDIA, Intel and S3 Graphics in design of D3D10 parts for the PC markets they want to serve.
Mass production happens in 2007, hopefully hitting the Vista takeup early enough to catch design wins in the markets they wish to address. To go along with the Mirage 4 development, meeting with SiS at Computex saw them increasingly happy about Xbox 360 shipments and sales, for which they provide the southbridge (pictured below), as well as hoping their silicon for AMD Socket F (new Opteron socket) would make inroads into the server space currently served by nForce.
Their memory production business is just taking off, too, SiS branching out into that market to serve customers willing to take no chances on core logic and memory compatibility, which SiS can handle if they provide both.
