ALi/ULi chipset roadmap. Prototypes on M1683 and M1689

Computex 2003 that took place last week indicated high interest to products of ULi Electronics, ALi´s daughter company. It seems after some time in shadows a new expansion is planned, now under the ULi brand. After parting from Ali in July 2003, ULi Electronics already earned NT$600 million for July and August.

Taiwanese The Digitimes referring to Uli reported that the company plans to focus on systems-on-chip (SoC) as well as K8 products. As for the single-channel P4, ULi believes the competition to be too strong and revenues too low to be seriously interested in this market. So the company will continue shipping its P4 chipsets only to selected customers. The same for dual-channel P4 solutions: Intel is too strong in this segment, so ULi doesn´t see any sense in such competition. As for mobile chipsets, ULi will continue its partnership with Trident Microsystems.

However, ULi doesn´t deny its presence on the P4 market at all. According to provisional information, in Q1 next year the company is to announce the M1683 chipset supporting Pentium 4 with up to 1GHz FSB, DDR500 memory, etc.

As for the Athlon 64 chipsets, already in December 2003 a new single-chip M1689 is to replace the M1687 Northbridge. According to ULi, coupled with popular M1563 Southbridge, M1689 would cost 30% less than competing products.

To illustrate the news below are some photos made by our Alexander Vorobyev at Computex 2003. This is an M1689 chipset flowchart:

And this is a prototype on the aforementioned chipset:

M1683-based P4 prototype:

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