Though ALi recent chipset business can hardly be called successful, the company won’t give up further developments in this field. ALi is determined to go on creating chipsets. We’ve chanced to have a look at its new roadmap that includes a number of new products for Athlon, Pentium 4 and Hammer CPUs.

In the Q’2 of 2002 ALi is about to launch an update of Aladdin P4 known as Aladdin P4A. This chipset will arrive together with the Pentium 4 line migration to 533MHz Quad Pumped Bus (Aladdin P4A will be equipped with a new North Bridge, M1671A, which supports 400/533MHz Quad Pumped Bus). Besides, the new chipset will support DDR333 at last. The other features of Aladdin P4A will totally coincide with those of its predecessor.

In the second half 2002 ALi will update its Athlon chipset line. MAGiK 1 will be succeeded with a new chipset uniting M1667 North Bridge and M1563 South Bridge. It is noteworthy that in this chipset ALi will finally give up using PCI bus to connect the Bridges: M1667 and M1563 will be connected via HyperTransport bus like Bridges in NVIDIA nForce. M1667 North Bridge will support AGP 8x and DDR333. M1563 South Bridge will also have some new abilities: we’ll see USB 2.0, ATA-133, Ethernet, AC/MC-97 and Memory Stick interface support. We’d like to stress that this Bridge will be used in every Ali’s chipset to be launched in 2003.

Next year ALi will update its Pentium 4 chipset once again. The new product will incorporate M1681 North Bridge supporting 400/533MHz bus, AGP 8x, DDR400 and DDR333, and the already mentioned M1563 South Bridge.

In 2003 ALi plans to launch a couple of chipsets for the ClawHammer family. The first of them will be equipped with M1678 and M1563 Bridges and will support AGP 8x. The other one will have M1688 North Bridge with an integrated graphics engine. It’s curious that M1688 will have a DDR333 controller to be used by the embedded graphics engine.