According to Digitimes, ALi hopes to start large-scale shipments of its Pentium 4 DDR chipset aka Aladdin P4 in January 2002. Despite the fact that the company’s initial plan implied the shipments to begin in the end of last year, ALi managed to start shipping only the first samples to the mainboard makers by now. However, even though the company is the last one to enter the Pentium 4 chipset market, it still has some chances to win a good position there.
In the first place, we should point out that the performance and features of the coming Aladdin P4 will not yield even a tiny bit to i845D, which has become some kind of reference for Pentium 4 DDR chipsets. At the same time. ALi solution will be considerably cheaper than i845D, which will give green light to this chipset in the low-cost Pentium 4 systems market. Of course, Aladdin P4 will have to stand serious competition with SiS645 here, however, some leading mainboard manufacturers including ASUS, Iwill, SOYO and Transcend confirmed their intention to use ALi product in their mainboards. Of course, ALi Aladdin P4 will never become as popular as SiS645, however, it will definitely sell much better than its ALi MAGiK 1 predecessor.
We would like to remind you that ALi, like SiS and ATI has Intel’s license for Pentium 4 processor bus, so no problems should arise here.