ALi Company, which is not very often mentioned in connection to the chipset market nowadays, still has certain plans concerning the possible recovery of this business. This site posted some news about a new version of ALi’s chipset plans. Here they are:

Intel platform (desktop and mobile):

• M1681. 400/533MHz system bus, AGP 8x, DDR333/DDR400 SDRAM, High Speed Link Bus (supposedly HyperTransport). The chipset should start sampling this month already.
• M1683. 400/533Mhz system bus, AGP 8x, DDR-II SDRAM, High Speed Link Bus (supposedly HtperTransport). The due date is Q3 2003. By the way, it is absolutely unclear why this chipset doesn’t support 667MHz Quad Pumped Bus. In H2 2003 we will see Pentium 4 on Prescott core using this bus.
• M1682. (Sonoma 4). 400/533MHz system bus, AGP 8x, DDR333 SDRAM, integrated Trident graphics core (it is most likely to be about the XP4 graphics core), High Speed Link Bus (supposedly HyperTransport). The shipments should start in the end of the year. The mobile version of this core logic will also support the upcoming mobile Banias CPUs.

AMD platform (desktop and mobile):

• M1687. Supports Hammer processor family, AGP 8x, HyperTransport to connect the North and South Bridges of the chipset. The mass manufacturing is planned for Q3, the official announcement has been already made.
• M1688. This is a modification of M1687 but equipped with the integrated graphics core from Trident (probably XP4). The due date is early 2003.

South Bridges:

• M1563. HyperTransport, 6 USB 2.0 ports, ATA/133 protocol, AC’97 sound, 10/100Mbit Ethernet, Memory Stick & SD Reader. The production should start in Q3 2002.
• M1565. HyperTransport, 6 USB 2.0 ports, ATA/133 and SerialATA-150 protocols, AC’97 sound, 10/100Mbit Ethernet, 802.11b. The launching is planned for early 2003.

Frankly speaking, all these plans are very impressive but pretty hard to believe. In fact, I hardly remember ALi being really successful with the chipsets, which enjoyed wide popularity. Hopefully, this time ALi engineers will manage to break this sad tendency.