ULi launches M1697, reveals product details and shipment targets Vyacheslav Sobolev, DigiTimes.com, [Friday 9 December 2005]

Yesterday, ULi Electronics officially launched its M1697 single-chip solution for the AMD K8 platform. The company started sampling this product in September, and the chip recently entered mass production, ULi associate vice president Bruce Tai said. ULi expects to ship several hundred thousands units of the product in the first quarter of 2006, he added.

Growing popularity of single-chip solutions for the AMD K8 platform is definitely a trend in the market, Tai emphasized. Apart from desktops, ULi sees opportunities for the M1697 to meet customer needs in such areas as small-form-factor (SFF) PCs and maybe notebooks.

The M1697 chip is manufactured under a 0.18-micron process at UMC. According to Tai, the next generation of ULi will utilize 0.13-micron technology, and the company already started developments based on 0.13-micron design rules. The M1697 has 6.4 million transistors, and its peak power consumption is 12W, he pointed out. The specification also mentions an 838-ball HSBGA package (35×35mm).

Following its predecessor, the M1695 tunnel chip for the AMD platform, the new chip has also successfully passed PCIe certification tests and is currently included in the PCI Express Integrators List (published by the PCI-SIG) as a newly posted product. Both the M1695 and M1697 chips utilize PCIe PHY cells from Rambus and PCIe digital controllers developed by ULi itself. The M1697 has four PCIe digital controllers serving 20 PCIe lanes, Tai said. The supported PCIe configurations include one x16 or two x8 connections for graphics cards and three x1 or one x4 connections for I/O devices. The M1697 can support dual-card graphics solutions, such as SLI, using PCIe x8 cards, and ULi showcased its reference board featuring Nvidia SLI technology as supported by a pair of the M1695 and M1697 chips, with the combination of chips being able to support two PCIe x16 cards.

According to ULi, the M1697 is compatible with a wide range of desktop and mobile AMD K8 processors including , and lines as well as the coming Socket M2 and products. Nine vendors (Abit, Albatron, Asustek, ASRock, DFI, Gigabyte, EPoX, Jetway and MSI) joined yesterday’s event as launch partners, and ULi hopes that notebook vendors will follow as customers, Tai noted. Desktop (see the photos below as examples) featuring the M1697 chip are expected to appear in the market in the first quarter of 2006.

Three HDD makers (Hitachi, Maxtor and Seagate) were also presented as launch partners. When asked what does this mean, Tai answered that the HDD makers provided their products for comprehensive SATA II testing. The M1697 features a built- in SATA II host controller supporting 3Gbps bandwidth, independent DMA (Direct Memory Access) mode operation on four ports and RAID levels 0, 1, 0+1, 5 plus disk concatenation (JBOD) technology. The specification also includes an 8-channel audio controller (compliant with High-Definition Audio technology), a Fast Ethernet MAC controller (up to 100Mbps) and USB 2.0 support (up to 8 ports). As promised, the chip incorporates some security functions through its support of the TPM (Trusted Platform Module) 1.2 specification developed by TCG (Trusted Computing Group).

This year, ULi has recorded year-on-year revenue losses from January to July. However, since August, the company has reversed the trend and posted year-on-year revenue growth every month.

ULi associate vice president Bruce Tai: “Growing popularity of single-chip solutions for the AMD K8 platform is definitely a trend in the chipset market.” Photo: Vyacheslav Sobolev, DigiTimes.com, December 2005.

Jetway A699DAS motherboard featuring ULi M1697 chip. Photo: Vyacheslav Sobolev, DigiTimes.com, December 2005.

EPoX 9U1697-J motherboard featuring ULi M1697 chip. Photo: Vyacheslav Sobolev, DigiTimes.com, December 2005.

ASRock 939GLAN-SATA2 motherboard featuring ULi M1697 chip. Photo: Vyacheslav Sobolev, DigiTimes.com, December 2005.

Abit UL8 Pro motherboard featuring ULi M1697 chip. Photo: Vyacheslav Sobolev, DigiTimes.com, December 2005.