X-bit labs

X-bit labs CeBIT 2005 Coverage: Day 7 (page 3)

Category: Editorial

by Anton Shilov

[ 03/24/2005 | 04:56 PM ]

ULi Releases New Chipsets, Pins Loads of Hopes on Multimedia Products

ULi Electronics, a core-logic division of ALi Corp., has not been present on the mass market for years now. Nevertheless, there are various applications where ALi and ULi can install their products and keep the company going and developing new products. This does not mean, however, that ULi simply does not want to address the market of mainstream personal computers where it used to be successful: ULi constantly and consistently develops new products for the PC market and seems to be getting back on track with its desktop business.

ULi’s Chipset Business Shows Positive Signs

At CeBIT 2005 ULi presented numerous ATI RADEON XPRESS 200-series based mainboards from ASUS, Gigabyte, Jetway, Shuttle (mainboard is intended for the company’s barebones), Tul Corp. with ULi’s M1573 I/O controllers instead of ATI’s own. The mainboards are in mass production now and provided that they are popular, there will be a new revenue stream for ULi. In fact, ULi’s South Bridges are very popular around the industry: they are not only utilized in computers based on Transmeta’s chips, which are rare, but also in workstations by Sun Microsystems.

  

  

Mainboards with ATI RADEON XPRESS 200 GMCH and ULi’s M1573 South Bridge

ULi’s M1573 South Bridge supports 2 Parallel ATA-133 ports, 4 Serial ATA-150 ports, PCI bus, USB 2.0, high definition audio as well as other input/output capabilities required today. M1573 is the world’s first South Bridge controller that can be used on both Intel’s and AMD’s platforms that supports high definition audio.

In addition, ULi showcased numerous mainboards, including prototype mainboards, which were based on purely ULi’s chipsets, including M1695 and M1689.

  
ABIT’s and ASRock’s mainboards based on ULi M1689

Originally unveiled in late September 2003, the ULi M1689 supports AGP 8x, PCI, 2 Parallel ATA-33/66/100 channels, 2 Serial ATA-150 ports with RAID, 10/100Mb/s Ethernet, USB 2.0, AC’97 audio and so on. The M1689 was originally expected to be available in mass quantities in Summer 2004, though, no leading mainboard makers have so far supplied platforms based on the core-logic in mass quantities.

ULi’s M1695 reference design

ULi Electronics’ M1695 chip that supports AMD64 processors features PCI Express x16 bus for graphics cards that is reprogrammable for dual PCI Express x8 lanes operation for applications that require two slots for graphics cards, such as multi-GPU technology from NVIDIA Corp. which is called SLI. The chip may be coupled with M1689 to support AGP 8x for additional flexibility.

Jetway’s M1695 mainboard

While there is modest success of ULi’s chipsets, the company does not expect its PC core-logic business to be very significant this year, but for next year the company preps more aggressive product roadmap. Still, ULi’s chipsets are currently used in several consumer electronics products, therefore, the primary business of the company are still chipsets.