by Anna Filatova
07/23/2002 | 01:30 PM
The constantly pendulating and confused by its own developments in the chipset field, ALi Company officially announced ALi M1647/M1563 chipset, a combination of North and South Bridges demonstrated at Computex 2002 and designed for x86-64 Hammer processors from AMD.
It seems to me that the North Bridges for this processor family are mostly the same by all manufacturers and we will hardly see anything remarkable here soon. All of them are none other but an AGP controller combined with a HyperTransport tunnel in a single package. ALi M1647 is not an exception as well: there is hardly any difference between it and the AMD’s own AMD-8151 chipset. Both support AGP 3.0 (AGP 2x/4x/8x), 16bit HyperTransport connection between the CPU and M1647 with 6.4GB/sec bandwidth, and 8bit HyperTransport interface between the chipset North Bridge and the I/O controller with 1.6GB/sec bandwidth. ALi K8 North Bridge will be packed into 31x31mm BGA with 564 pins.<%BANNER[article]%>
The chipset South Bridge, M1563, seems to be a bit more exciting to consider. Firstly, it boasts a great lot of features and secondly, it will be also used in ALi’s chipsets for Pentium 4 and maybe even with the North Bridges of other companies too. As you know, I/O controller of M1563 supports two ATA-66/100/133 channels, 6 USB 2.0 ports, up to 6 PCI slots, Ethernet, Memory Stick, Secure Digital, fast IR, AC Link and other interfaces and input-output systems. M1563 South Bridge will be packed into 31x31mm BGA with 444 pins.
We used to complain about ALi’s not very fast North Bridges and imperfect AGP drivers. At the same time the company could boast some pretty nice I/O controllers. As we see, M1563 South Bridge is really not bad, although it doesn’t support the SerialATA interface, which will be very popular by the time AMD Athlon-64 is out. The simple North Bridge of the system has to be quality. We’ll see, maybe soon ALi turns into the developer of interesting and fast chipsets?