ALi Corporation and its official subsidiary ULi Electronics together introduced M1683, their newest North Bridge chip supporting Intel Pentium 4 and Celeron processors. The announcement ignites ALi’s coming back to the chipset market, however, specifications of the core-logic are not very strong or competitive and that is why the return of ALi is not a big event for the industry.

The M1683 North Bridge supports Intel Celeron, Intel Pentium 4 or Intel Pentium M CPUs with 400, 533 and 800MHz Quad Pumped Bus, as well as different types of single-channel memory, including PC2100, PC2700, PC3200 and even PC133. Probably performance offered by the newcomer will be comparable to products like VIA PT800, i845PE or SiS648FX, but will definitely not achieve the level of dual-channel novelties, such as i865/i875-sereies and so on. Furthermore, ALi’s I/O controllers do not support Serial ATA-150, as result, the core-logic will be less feature-rich compared to solutions from VIA and SiS.

ALi M1563 I/O controller boasts with support for 2 Parallel ATA-66/100/133 ports, up to 6 USB 2.0 ports, AC’97 audio, up to 6 PCI slots, Memory Stick interface, 10/100 Mb/s Fast Ethernet and HomePNA 1.0/2.0 MAC layer. Additional features include Host Signal Processing (HSP) software modem solution, ACPI support, green function, and Real Time Clock.

M1683/M1563 North Bridge and South Bridge are connected using HyperTransport interconnection, what is a bit strange for a chipset designed for Intel processors. Well, since neither ALi, nor ULi have their own data-transfer technology, unlike VIA or SiS, HyperTransport implementation seems to be reasonable.

The novelty may be used in mobile and desktop computers. Keeping in mind that performance and feature bar in notebook sector is not as high as in the desktop market, ALi/ULi definitely have more chances to win notebook rather than desktop designs.