X-bit labs

X-bit Labs CeBIT Hannover 2004 Coverage: Part 3 (page 2)

Category: Editorial

by Anton Shilov

[ 03/23/2004 | 03:57 AM ]

ALi/ULi: Back in the Business?

Last year ALi span off its chipset division into an independent company – ULi Electronics – that is primarily focused on chipsets and other related host-based peripherals. More than a couple of years passed since ALi’s chipsets were on the market, so, for ULi it is a big problem today to come back, as the company needs to convince mainboard makers as well as actual end-users that its technology is enough confident and reliable compared to solutions by Intel, VIA, SiS, NVIDIA and so on.

In fact, ULi is doing pretty well in the mobile market, the company is the main supplier of core-logic components for Transmeta-based systems, moreover, the firm supplies loads of I/O controllers for notebooks with North Bridges by ATI Technologies. Right now ULi believes that sales of Transmeta Crusoe and Transmeta Efficeon processors will uptick late this year, which will essentially mean higher sales for ULi.

Mobile market is certainly not the only market ULi wants to address. Fortunately, the company already has some interesting products for desktops as well as design wins with mainboard makers, but one of the things the company really needs today is demand for its solutions from customers. At CeBIT the firm is demonstrating numerous mainboards from well-known manufacturers, such as ASUSTeK Computer, Albatron, ASRock, ECS, EPoX, DFI, SOYO, QDI and Topstar, for AMD Athlon 64 and Intel Pentium 4 processors based on M1687 and M1683 chipsets respectively. All those mainboards are available now, but in somewhat limited quantities.

Besides mainboards, ULi/ALi is also showcasing some notebooks, standalone controllers and even a USB HDTV tuner.

The most impressive thing in the booth probably is demonstration of a mainboard for PGA939 AMD64 processors powered by M1689 – the first single-chip core-logic from ULi. The company will start shipping this product in July , which is not that bad, as the M1689 may end up as a good competitor for NVIDIA’s nForce3 250, as feature-set of ULi’s M1689 seems to be pretty similar.

In the second half of the year ULi also plans a new chipset for Intel Pentium 4 processors. The company’s M1685 (with M1566 I/O controller) will sport PCI Express interconnections x16, x4 and x1; single-channel DDR and DDR2 memory controller as well as all Pentium 4 and Pentium M microprocessors.

Given that all ULi’s chipsets have pretty efficient power-management, I believe that they all may also be used in mobile computers, especially those for desktop PC replacement.

GeIL Displays DDR2-667 Memory Modules

There are very few DDR2 memory modules available in the market and there are DDR memory sticks working at faster clock-speeds than DDR2 products. Keeping in mind lower cost of DDR memory now, massive ramp of DDR2 products definitely looks pretty cloudy for the next couple of quarters.  Nevertheless, this does not indicate that DDR2 does not have any bright sides at all. One of such benefits is scalability – ability to work at higher clock-speeds. 667MHz cannot be achieved with conventional DDR memory, but can be delivered using DDR2 technology. While the industry expects 667MHz memory to ramp next year, GeIL has such modules in its CeBIT 2004 booth out now.

The company plans to start shipping PC2-5300 memory modules that can pump up to 10.6GB/s in dual-channel mode already during the second quarter of the year to let overclockers to reach new performance heights. Latency settings for the memory modules are set to 4-4-4, equal to PC2-4200 (533MHz) memory modules. Memory modules are equipped with aluminum heat-spreaders and also with GeIL’s thermal sticker.

Thing that is not clear about the modules is their pricing.