As far as the benchmarks are concerned, SiS claims better integrated video performance than Intel's upcoming i815 (with cache) and VIA's upcoming KM133 (with integrated S3 Savage 4). We hope to see the performance ourselves at some point.
On the I/O side, the 730S provides an ATA-100 interface. We asked SiS if they thought ATA-100 was really necessary and they admitted that, in today's machines, the hard drive is the bottleneck, not the bus speed. But still, ATA-100 is a good feature for the OEM checklist. The chipset provides up to six USB ports split under two different USB masters. This pretty much gets rid of any need for a hub unless you go a bit overboard with your USB devices.
On the riser slot issue, SiS is interface agnostic, supporting the old AMR interface, Intel's new CNR interface, and VIA's upcoming rival ACR interface. Again, this gives motherboard makers a bit more flexibility in board design. And the 730S includes integrated networking, for both 10/100 Ethernet and home phoneline networking (HPNA). The motherboard maker only needs to add the physical layer. If the maker needs more than one interface, SiS can provide their SiS 900 LAN chip, connected through PCI.
For those looking to save power, specifically the mobile market, the SiS730S provides a major plus in its low, ~4W, power consumption. As AMD phazes out the K6-2 and moves the Duron into the mobile market, SiS will have a very competetive mobile chipset. This is not only because of their low power consumption, but also because they kill multiple birds, a veritable flock of seagulls, with one stone. Northbridge, southbridge, VGA, LAN, Audio, and more all in one part not only saves power, it saves valuable motherboard space.
All in all, the SiS730S is not a revolutionary chipset, but it is a large evolutionary jump for SiS and makes them seriously competetive, at least as far as checklists are concerned. As they bring their own fab online, which they say is finally up and running now in early June, they are in a good position to provide a strong competitor against VIA's Athlon offerings. SiS' future is looking much brighter to us now than it has in recent memory, though we don't need shades as of yet.
For more hardware coverage from Computex 2000, click here.
Jon Simon
Assistant Editor