ALi Corporation announced that it had received license on 800MHz Quad Pumped Bus for Intel processors. The company expects to launch its M1683 chipset for appropriate CPUs in the second half of the year.

Like in case of VIA and SiS, terms and conditions of the agreement between Intel and ALi are not disclosed.

The number three Taiwanese chipset designer, who used to be a rather well-known 4 or 3 years ago, plans to introduce its own M1683 chipset with 800MHz Quad Pumped Bus and single-channel PC3200 DDR SDRAM memory support. Earlier it was said that this North Bridge also supported DDR-II SDRAM, but at this time the company is tight-lipped in regards this fact. Among the other key-features of the chipset we should mention AGP 8x and Hyper-Transport interconnection between the North and South Bridges.

Earlier this year ALi decided to spin-off the chipset division and later this year ULi Electronics will begin operations. The company does not build castles in the sky about its chipset business and expects it to account about 1/5 of all sales in 2003. Keeping this fact in mind, I can conclude that we will not see a lot of mainboards powered by ALi M1683 chipset this year. Well, not a big grief, to tell you the truth, since ALi’s core-logic does not seem to be a really fast one, but just another competitor to mainboards based on i845-series with 800MHz QPB support.