Xabre's Fab at 0.13-micron

First it was AGP 8x; now it's 0.13-micron. SiS has once again snuck past competitors and implemented the latest and greatest technology before anyone else.

It might have something to do with the fact that SiS has its own Fab

First it was AGP 8x; now it's 0.13-micron. SiS has once again snuck past competitors and implemented the latest and greatest technology before anyone else.

It might have something to do with the fact that SiS has its own Fab factory.

The Xabre600 chipset is the first GPU on the planet to be released using the 0.13-micron process. Of course, this means the chip gains all the advantages of a smaller core, including reduced temperatures, faster clock speeds, and cheaper construction.

Although the new NV30 will be 0.13-micron, SiS is the first company to release a graphics chip commercially that makes use of the smaller manufacturing process.

The Xabre600's performance however is aimed at the middle to low budget range, and will be up against 9000 PRO, GeForce4 MX, and just barely on the fringe, Ti4200 cards.

The Xabre is DirectX 8.1-compliant, which should help it compete against NVIDIA's offerings. This didn't help its first iterations however, with other Xabre cards suffering from poor performance and unstable drivers. Hence, along with this new release is a new driver revision that should remedy these problems.

Early reviews say otherwise however, and point to a lack of optimisation. As a result, the theoretical potential of the chip has yet to be realised. It looks like we'll be playing the same waiting game we did many months ago with ATI, as SiS begins the slow process of evolving its drivers.