by Anand Lal Shimpion August 1, 1997 9:36 PM EST

When AMD announced that they were looking for a candidate for the “official” Super7 Chipset (Socket-7 + AGP + 100MHz Frontside Bus) the market never expected Acer Labs (ALi) to be a viable candidate.  Originally best known for their low cost Aladdin IV chipset found in most PC Chips motherboards, ALi was never much of a contender in the Chipset Industry taking a back seat to the duel of Intel and VIA.  For once, the Socket-7 Chipset Market is the platform for a 4-way war of chipsets between Intel’s 430TX, VIA’s VP3 (and MVP3), SiS’ 5591, and now, ALi’s Aladdin V.  What makes the Aladdin V so special?  Quite a few things.

First of all, the Aladdin V meets all of the requirements to be a Super7 chipset, it supports the Accelerated Graphics Port, all current Socket-7 processors including AMD’s upcoming K6-3D, and, the most sought after feature in a Socket-7 chipset, support for a 100MHz Frontside Bus.  A combination of meeting these requirements, the extremely large cacheable memory area of the chipset, and a feature-set that puts Intel’s TX Chipset to shame makes the Aladdin V chipset appear to be the king of the Socket-7 arena…or at least a contender for the throne.

The Aladdin V, in theory can accept up to 1GB of RAM, all cacheable.  Doing so would put outstanding amounts of stress on the Bus, especially when using the 100MHz bus speed, so expect Aladdin V motherboards to feature no more than 3 DIMM slots.  One of the most important features the Aladdin V chipset boasts is the internal L2 cache the chipset features, more specifically the M1541 chip has an integrated 16K x 10-bit Tag RAM as well as 16K x 2 L2 cache SRAM, both of which decrease cost and increase performance somewhat.  The most important reason for including the Tag RAM on chip is to make using the 100MHz bus speed possible.  The 100MHz Bus Frequency puts a heavy strain on the L2 cache, and tests have shown that without fast L2 cache & a capable Tag RAM chip (6ns or faster) the 100MHz bus speed has the potential to become quite erratic.  By placing the Tag RAM on the chipset ALi  eliminates the possibility of the L2 cache or chipset as being the limiting factor in making use of the 100MHz bus speed.  Leaving your CPU, and Memory since the Aladdin V supports a Pseudo Synchronous PCI/AGP Bus to keep the PCI bus speed at or around the 33MHz marker, and the AGP bus at or around the 66MHz point.  

The deep buffers between the CPU and DRAM interfaces should keep performance of the Aladdin V on par with or above that of all Socket-7 motherboards based on Intel chipsets, using the 100MHz bus speed the Aladdin V should be able to remove the Intel TX chipset from the picture as a possible competitor when dealing with performance.

UltraDMA, PC97 Compliance, and Advanced Power Management support are among the now standard features that ALi brings to the table with their Aladdin V, making it a very promising chipset…shortly you’ll begin to see the first Aladdin V motherboards make their way into the mainstream market, then we can truly decide whether or not this chipset lives up to the hype.

Thanks to the closure and subsequent deletion of AnandTech here is a locally hosted copy of the relevant part of the Super Socket 7 Chipset Guide article.

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