For SiS, the big news is their upcoming SiS 730S chipset for the Athlon. With ATA100, AGP4x, integrated video, and a wide variety of other integrated features, the 730S has what it takes to be a strong competitor against VIA's new offerings. You can see a more in-depth look at the 730S in our 730S First Glimpse article.

We asked for an opinion from several different motherboard makers on SiS chipset stability and compatibility as well as the 730S's market prospects. As far as stability, we received answers from across the board, from SiS products being as good as Intel's to being worse than VIA's. As for market prospects, most of the companies we spoke with said they had plans for a 730S-based motherboard. All board makers we spoke with said that they had concerns over SiS being able to deliver enough chipsets.

Why the doubts about SiS being able to deliver? SiS recently started their own fabrication plant, which they have had difficulty getting into volume production. Though production levels are low right now, eventually, the plant will produce more than SiS needs, which means that SiS will sell excess capacity to other companies. This hurts SiS' relationship with TMSC and other fabricators, that SiS still needs to produce chipsets. SiS tells us that their own fab is now in production and that the situation is improving.

AMD's Thunderbird should be big at the show. With 256k of full-speed, on-die L2 cache, its performance should match that of the Pentium III Coppermine, which also comes with 256k of full-speed on-die L2 cache. Every vendor we spoke with has a KT133 Socket A motherboard planned to run with the Thunderbird. There was also talk of the KT133's Duron support. The Duron will be AMD's Celeron fighter. One board maker told us that AMD plans on having about a million CPUs ready to go with the Duron launch.