Q1.     Which are the planned new ULi chipsets for K8 platforms supporting new technologies like PCI-E, Gigabit Ethernet, WiFI ? What are the advantages of the chipset versus others available ?

A1.     ULi has an upcoming K8 chipset, M1695, to support PCIe, M1695 will be available in Q4 2004. M1695 have several advantages - M1695 is a super PCIe tunnel chip for HyperTransport bus. M1695 supports 1 x16 and 2 x1 PCIe bus, total 20 PCIe lanes. The above PCIe bus can be configured to 2 x8 and 1 x4 for High End PCIe Server/workstation market.

M1695 also supports nVidia PCIe VGA card SLi Multi-GPU technology. M1695 can be paired with all kinds of  HyperTransport bus southbridge chipset from ULi to support different kind platform features (i.e. SATA, GbE.....)

Q2.    Why is it that ULi adopt a single chipset design for the M1689 versus M1687 which uses a North South design ?

A2.    The time to market a product is very important. Due to that reason, ULi introduced M1687 in a North-South 2 chip solutions. As you know that AMD K8 CPU included memory controller, from architecture and cost point of view, single chipset is better than two chips solution, that is why we have two steps for K8 platform, two chips first followed by a single chipset solution.

Q3.    Are there any plans to have a brand new K7 chipset ? Why and why not ?

A3.    No. ULi has no plans to introduce a new K7 chipset as the CPU market trend is moving from K7 to K8. Lately, AMD announced K7 and K8 Sempron, M1689 is the best chipset for K8 Sempron CPU, M1689 will be able to leverage on the K8 Sempron market trend.

Q4.    Are ULi chipsets used on server boards supporting dual or quad processors?

A4.    From the architectural point of view, ULi chipsets can support dual or quad processors. Some of our customer use ULi M1563 for server/workstation boards. M1695 is good for Dual and Quad K8 multiprocessors PCIe platform.

Q5.    Are there any new P4 chipsets being planned ? Why are there no Dual Channel supporting chipsets so far ?

A5.    We have new P4 PCIe chipset, M1685, keep going. It will be sampled in Q4 2004. ULi needs to distinguish itself with Intel chipsets a different market segment.