SiS, Silicon Integrated Systems

SiS is a good alternative to Intel while being somewhat underspoken. They had the reputation for creating chipsets for discount boards, and this was often true, although many of their chipsets were very good. Let’s look at a couple of their Socket 7 solutions:

• 5571 - the chipset which made a name for SiS. It supported the 75MHz and 83MHz bus speeds and SDRAM (only 64MB cacheable), although it did not support the UltraATA standard. It also supported Linear Burst Mode which gave the Cyrix 6×86 more performance than any other chipset. This created a mental link in the techie mind between the 5571 and the 6×86. The chipset was used in the Mtech Mustang board, a board famous at the time for performance with the 6×86.


• 5597 - this chipset was SiS’s successor to the 5571. It is alot like the 5571, but it incorporated an on-board VGA controller and supports Ultra-ATA. It is also ACPI compatible.

Here is a chart of all the SiS chipsets for Socket 7:

ALi (A division of Acer)

Another chipset manufacturer which has created its share of chipsets, none of which stole any spotlight until the release of the Aladdin V. Let’s take a look at a couple chipsets:

• Aladdin IV, TXPro - Like the Via VXPro, the TXPro is a low cost, entry-level chipset modeled after the TX chipset (surprise!). The chipset supported the 75MHz and 83MHz bus speed, but, like the 430TX, was limited to 64MB of cacheable RAM when using an 8-bit TAG RAM. Some manufacturers used an 11-bit TAG RAM allowing up to 512MB of cacheable memory with the TXPro. It was not much different than the TX chipset except that it was not as well designed, and its performance was not as great.


• Aladdin V - this chipset, like the VP3, was a powerful Socket 7 chipset offering AGP support, 100MHz bus speed support, as well as support for all major Socket 7 processor including the K6-2. It also had a very large cacheable memory limit. In fact, in theory, the chipset could support up to 1GB of memory, all cacheable. The chipset was a great performer, and, feature-wise, blew the Intel TX chipset to hell. Finally, after a disappointing start with the Aladdin IV, ALi was officially in the war over the chipset.

AMD-640

With Intel backing out of the fifth generation chipset market, AMD saw a need to get into the market, especially since AMD was continuing the Socket 7 market with its K6. Needing to get their chipset out fast, they bought rights to Via’s VP-2 chipset technology and used it to create the AMD-640 chipset.

The 640 was a decent chipset, from what I’ve heard. It was considered better than all 430 series Intel chipsets. It supported up to 2 meg of secondary cache, SDRAM, and Ultra-DMA. It also boasted compatibility with 512 MB of system memory and support for ECC RAM, features lacked by the Intel TX chipset. AMD later released the 640AGP, which supported AGP as well as the 100 MHz frontside bus. 640AGP also dropped out support for some older memory technologies like EDO and went strictly with SDRAM as well as DDR-SDRAM support.