Computex 2000 Coverage Day 1: Chipsets

ALi

When AMD launched their Athlon 10 months ago ALi was on the list for releasing a supporting chipset, a chipset that never really surfaced on any motherboards other than prototypes and mockups presented at trade shows As a company, ALi has been spending quite a bit of time redirecting their efforts at the IA (Internet Appliance) market instead of the performance/value desktop PC segment they had been concentrating on during the time of the Super7 platform.

In spite of this, ALi did promise to deliver a DDR Athlon platform and if everything goes according to plan it should arrive sometime this year. We asked VIA if they thought ALi was capable of delivering on this claim, in response they stated "[we] think that ALi is really good at PowerPoint." That's a pretty low blow from VIA but it also helps to illustrate the point that not only is designing an Athlon chipset difficult but designing one with DDR SDRAM support is quite an ordeal as well.

We asked every single manufacturer if they planned on using ALi's solution, especially if it became available before VIA's KT266 and every single manufacturer except for one had no plans whatsoever for using the ALi chipset (M1647). Each manufacturer had their own reasons for not pursuing an ALi based DDR Athlon solution ranging from a "good relationship with VIA and no reason to disrupt it" to a more serious "we are still on not so friendly terms with ALi."

The one manufacturer that did announce plans for a DDR Athlon motherboard based on the ALi solution was Iwill and they were more than proud to display their DDR Athlon mockup, which was actually the only Athlon board with 184-pin DDR memory slots that we saw on the floor. ALi told us that there would only be one manufacturer that would be producing a board based on their M1647 which is extremely disappointing, for ALi that is, since one motherboard manufacturer, especially Iwill (they're a great company but they happen to be one of the smallest motherboard manufacturers in Taiwan), isn't enough to get people using their chipset.

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