ALi

A Quick Peek at ALi

After our meeting with Sapphire, we noticed that ALi’s suite was nearby, so we poked our heads in to see what was on display. For the most part, ALi chipsets have been muscled out of the Pentium 4 and Athlon XP markets. Nevertheless, it continues to offer Pentium 4 core logic, which a representative claims is capable of up to 1200MHz front side bus settings. Further, it employs an 800MHz HyperTransport between the north and south bridges, facilitating up to 1.6GB per second of bandwidth. We didn’t get a chance to speak with an ALi product manager, but we surmise that the M1683 platform is oriented for mainstream consumption.

ALi also has its unannounced Athlon 64-compliant M1689 on display. Though the chipset is an early revision, it’s the first Socket 939 chipset we’ve seen. The single-chip solution adds Serial ATA support to ALi’s repertoire, along with dual-channel, non-registered memory support for what will become AMD’s flagship early in 2004. M1689 is also being shown paired to a Socket 754 interface with single-channel memory support.

ALi's M1687 platform for Socket 754

We'd guess this P4 chipset is value-oriented

For the time being, M1687 is ALi’s only Athlon 64 platform. Unfortunately, while we’ve known about the M1687 for quite some time, motherboard manufacturers are slow to adopt it. Clearly, if ALi wants to compete in the chipset market, M1689 needs to demonstrate a compelling combination of performance and useful features.

Single-chip ALi chipset for Socket 754 with Serial ATA

Single-chip ALi chipset for Socket 940 with Serial ATA

The company isn’t banking on an overwhelming comeback in the chipset market, though. It now offers a complete line of peripheral controllers and DVD decoders; the suite is full of USB 2.0 cameras, memory cards, and even MP3 players. An adjoining room houses ALi’s DVD offerings, ranging from decoders to controllers to RF signal processors. Though ALi is apparently finding success in diversification, we’d like to see the firm polish its new chipsets and compete with the likes of NVIDIA, VIA, and Intel.