German web magazine Chip.de has posted details of confidential SiS PR material on their website. According to the papers Xabre II will officially announced by June this year. However Xabre II will target the mainstream and budget markets of the video processor market and that in direct competition to established video processor manufacturers such as ATI and Nvidia. Xabre II will be a fully DirectX 9 compatible adapter with scalable VPU architecture. Quite a surprise is the SiS memory configuration: Xabre II will feature 128/256 Mbyte configurations of DDR-II or even DDR-III memory on a 128bit bus bandwidth. Xabre II will be manufactured on a 0.13 micrometer process. Xabre II is codenamed SiS 340 in its highend version and SiS 341 in the budget version. SiS 340 features eight texture rendering pipelines (Octa-Pipe)while its smaller borther SiS will use a four pipeline setup (Qua-Pipe). Still in R&D but scheduled for Q1 2004 is SiS 345 with Vertex and Pixelshader 3.0 support. Xabre II is said to utilize about 85 million transisitors which in comparison is significantly less than R300/R350 and NV30 use. But SiS seems to be confident that Xabre II will remain competitive in the mainstream market due to implemented features such as AGP 8x, full DirectX 9 support, DDRII memory with effective 1Ghz clock speed resulting in approximately 16GB/s memory bandwidth, Occlusion (Z-Buffer support) engine and bandwidth saving techniques named Frictionless Memory Engine II. According to Chip.de SiS completed the tape-out phase and official announcements of Xabre II are scheduled for June 2003. Mass production is said to follow one month later. Xabre II cards are speculated to be available for around 200? Euro. Chip.de Xabre II article - german