SiS963L South Bridge

MuTIOL

Like SiS’ previous chipsets, the North Bridge and South Bridge of the SiS 748 chipset are connected by SiS’ proprietary MuTIOL interconnect technology. MuTIOL acts as a pathway between both chips, is 16 bits wide, and operates at 533MHz. The link between both chips is bi-directional, meaning two independent pathways are used. One can be sending data from the SiS748 North Bridge chip to the SiS963L South Bridge, while the second can send data in the opposite direction.

The net result is that bandwidth between the two chips is 1GB/sec, the highest in the industry. SiS proclaims that with USB 2.0 peaking at 480MB/sec, IDE at 133MB/sec, and PCI at 133MB/sec, their MuTIOL interconnect is necessary to provide more effective bandwidth for these devices than competing solutions, offering better overall system performance under load. Keep in mind however, that these are peak figures on paper; in practice these devices won’t achieve their maximum effectiveness.

Features

The 963L South Bridge is an updated variant of what is nearly two-year-old technology. As a result, its feature set is beginning to show signs of age. For instance, 963L offers no native Serial ATA hard drive support. If a motherboard manufacturer chooses to implement a design with Serial ATA support, they must use the SiS180 companion chip. SiS180 supports up to two Serial ATA ports as well as one parallel ATA (with two devices configured in a master/slave configuration) allowing for up to eight devices when paired with the 963L.

In addition, SiS180 offers native IDE RAID support. According to SiS’ documentation, RAID Levels 0, 1, 0+1, and JBOD (spanning, combining two or more hard disks into one volume that is recognized by the OS; combining the capacity of both drives) are supported, making it more flexible than Intel’s recently released ICH5R.

Without native Serial ATA support, SiS963L falls short of VIA’s KT600 chipset, whose VT8237 South Bridge offers similar functionality built-in. NVIDIA’s nForce2 chipset also lacks Serial ATA support, although NVIDIA does plan to address this later this summer.

For connectivity, up to six USB 2.0/1.1 ports are supported (compared to six in nForce2 and eight in KT600) but since SiS has removed FireWire support from 963L, the SiS 748 chipset doesn’t support FireWire devices (a feature which is also omitted on other recent Athlon XP chipsets). Soft audio (5.1 channel) and modem are supported, as is 10/100 Ethernet.