Karbosguide.com - Module 2d.03b

Non-Intel chip sets (continued)

The contents:

ALi Aladdin 5
SiS 630

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ALi Aladdin 5

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Acer Laboratories Inc in Taiwan produces chip sets as well as other products. This Aladdin V chip set is for modern Socket 7 CPUs like AMD K6-2 running up to 350 MHz with a 100 MHz system bus.

It consists of two chips, a north and a south bridge. There features are:

M1541(AGP, CPU-to-PCI Bridge, Memory Cache & Buffer Controller)

Interface for all socket 7 compatible processors

PBSRAM and Memory Cache L2 controller, internal MESI tag bits (16K*2) and Tag RAM (16K*10)

High performance FPM/EDO/SDRAM DRAM controller

PCI 2.1 compliant bus interface

Smart deep buffer design for CPU-to-DRAM, CPU-to-PCI, and PCI-to-DRAM

Flexible 64-bit memory bus interface for the best DRAM upgradeability and ECC/Parity design

456-pin BGA

M1543 (PCI-to-ISA Bus Bridge with Super I/O)

ACPI support, green function

2-channel dedicated Ultra-33 IDE Master controller

2-port USB controller, SMBus controller, PS/2 Keyboard/Mouse controller

Super I/O (Floppy Disk Controller, 2 serial port/1 parallel port) support.

Two full function universal asynchronous receiver/ transmitters (UARTs), a flexible high performance internal data separator with send/receive 16 byte FIFOs.

Serial Infra Red for wireless communications with other devices.

Swap drives A & B.

SPP, PS/2, EPP and ECP parallel port.

328-pin BGA

See ALi's own homepage about this chip set.

SiS

Also SiS produces a chip set for Socket 7. It holds two chips and is called Sis 530:

This chip set is one of the first to implement the ATA/66 interface for EIDE units.

SiS630

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The SiS630 chip set (only one chip) is more advanced and is compliant with the chip set trend earlier described here at Karbosguide.com. It is PC99 and PCI 2.2 compatible. It supports Pentium II/IIIs and Celerons.

On RAM it supports PC-133 SDRAM as well as VCRAM (?), and it holds three dual inline memory modules (DIMMs) with up to 1.5Gb main memory. SiS630 also supports Ultra ATA 66 IDE and five "OpenHCI" USB ports. Something called ultra-AGPTM architecture is also mentioned as well as digital flat panel interfaces for LCD and TV output. Even 10/100M Fast Ethernet is included on-chip.

The 630 is consisting of the north bridge and the SiS 960 (a south bridge I/O chip) as well as the real 128-bit 2D/3D graphics engine (SiS300) all into one single chip.

For K6-II too..

For the K6-III SIS has introduced the SiS540 chip set, which has the exactly same features as SiS630. The 630 set costs $35 while the AMD set is cheaper ($29).

Soyo ETEQ

The world's biggest motherboard manufacture used a ETEQ 8236638AT/6629 AGP chip set (ETEQ 6638 for short) which gave new performance using a bus connecting the CPU with the L2 cache at 100 MHz. The RAM worked at only 66 MHz.

No more information available - but tests shows that their board SY 5EH5/M (When are Taiwanese manufacturers going to start naming their products something easy to remember like s525?) performs very well with AMD K6-300 at 3 X 100 MHz. The Soyo chip set is produced by VIA and is probably the MVP3 set in new packing.

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