Chip clone company Rise is expected to announce this week that it has signed a deal with a third party to provide fab facilities which will allow it to make Socket 370 parts next year. Rise, which has its HQ in Santa Clara, is one of around 150 or so "fabless" companies and the deal will represent something of a breakthrough for the firm, which currently employs 100 people. Although no one from the company will yet say who the partner is, Rise believes that the growth of the Basic PC notebook and desktop markets will allow it to compete with larger players. A representative said that Intel and AMD are concentrating on the high end of the Basic PC market. Rise claims that its products' low power consumption and good performance will allow cheaper prices than either Intel or AMD. The chips will work with Socket Seven and 100MHz chipsets as well as 370 pin parts. Its mP6 and Mp6II products have three way superscalar architectures, decoupled superscalar pipelines and native execution. Rise claims that Wintune 97 shows around a 15 per cent increase over Pentium II core performance at the same clock frequencies at 200MHz. ®