A company that has been absent from the mainstream chipset market for years is reportedly plans to unveil a chipset that potentially may become big in the AMD64 market. While the whole market is not large and the competition is strong, for ULi this may be a way in.

“ULi Electronics plans to unveil its first PCIe-enabled North Bridge chip, the M1695, for the Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) K8 [AMD64] platform by the end of this month, according to company sources,” claimed Tuesday DigiTimes web-site based in Taiwan.

ULi Electronics’ M1695 chip is expected to feature 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, as well as AGP 8x lane, providing advanced flexibility for enthusiasts and computer makers.

The company reportedly plans to couple its M1695 North Bridge with M1573 I/O controller, which capabilities are unknown.

Currently chipset designers NVIDIA Corp. and VIA Technologies are fiercely competing for the market of chipsets supporting AMD64 microprocessors, such as AMD Athlon 64 and AMD Sempron, and PCI Express interconnection. NVIDIA Corp. offers a comprehensive lineup of its nForce4 core-logic designs for different needs and customers with single of dual PCI Express slots for graphics. At the same time VIA Technologies currently has only one product to offer – K8T890 – that provides single PCI Express x16 lane, but is also set to offer a core-logic that would sport both AGP and PCI Express interconnections for graphics cards.

It is unclear when chipset designer ULi can ship actual products commercially and which mainboard makers may be interested in M1695. In the past the company introduced chipsets, but no actual devices based on the logic components reached the market.