SIS has Rambus chipset in sight despite denials

4i Direct DRAM-based replacement for Intel's Tulloch

SIS is still in the running to offer a Rambus chipset for the Pentium 4 despite the denials company executives issued last week.

Industry sources cited by EBN claim that the company has offered to develop a chipset that would support Rambus' quad-channel RDRAM - 4i Direct DRAM - after Intel decided that it wasn't going to produce one of its own.

Intel had planned to introduce Tulloch, a quad-channel Rambus successor to the current 850 chipset, mid-2002. But recently it dropped Tulloch from its roadmaps in favour of an updated version of the 850, codenamed Tehama E, which will support the upcoming 533MHz P4 frontside bus.

SIS was cited as the developer of the first non-Intel PC-oriented RDRAM chipset by unnamed industry sources cited by CNet. Last week, executives quoted by DigiTimes claimed that such a product was "unlikely". As we said at the time, that's hardly a denial and could easily mask a programme to determine whether a market exists for a quad-channel RDRAM chipset. ®

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