If you have heard of SOYO K8USA, you must be familiar with the chipset maker ULi. ULi electronics has successfully created a performance chipset for the K8 Socket 754 that was present on the SOYO K8USA. With the introduction of Semprons and new processors, ULi designed a new single chipset that supports both the Socket 754 and Socket 939 AMD 64 processors. This new chipset - ULi M1689 integrates Ethernet, 2 SATA, 8 USB ports all within a single chip. This greatly reduces heat dissipation and cost for production of boards since one chip is required.

Various manufacturers are developing boards based on this chipset and some of these include ASrock. By the time you read this article, ASrock K8 Combo-Z, an innovative board that uses the same chipset supporting two socket types will be available on sale in various markets like Japan. (we will have a review of ASrock K8 Combo-Z soon).

The M1689 is ULi’s new generation super single chipset that offers a high-performance, the highest integration and cost effective solution for AMD Hammer microprocessor PC systems.The M1689 integrates AGP8X controller, AC-Link Host Controller, 2-channel dedicated Ultra-66/100/133 IDE Master controller,

USB 2.0/1.1 Host controllers with 8 ports in total, IO APIC controller, 1/10/100 Mb/s Fast Ethernet, SATA, and HyperTransportTM Technology Link interface. Additional features include Host Signal Processing (HSP) software modem solution, ACPI support, green function, and Real Time Clock.

By incorporating USB 2.0 host controller with the data transfer rate up to 480 Mb/s, the M1689 provides the most advanced connectivity for higher performance USB devices. 8 USB ports are supported with 1 USB 2.0 EHCI (Enhanced Host Controller Interface) controller and 3 USB 1.1 OHCI controllers.

The built-in Audio solution in the M1689 is an advanced PCI HSP audio controller with Scatter-gathering DMA fully supported. The M1689 Audio is compliant with standard AC97 CODEC and supports 6 audio playback channels for PCM_out L/R, Surr L/R, Center and LFE, dual PCM inputs and dual microphone inputs.

The 100BASE-TX/10Base-T Fast Ethernet MAC is fully compliant with PCI Spec. 2.3 and IEEE802.3u. The MAC provides a direct interface to the PCI local bus and direct connection to the PHY/transceiver via MII interface. As a controller, it is bus master capable. The MAC also supports auto-negotiation function that enables it to detect speed and duplex automatically.

The MAC provides the Power Management capability that is compliant with the Network Device Class Power Management Specifications Rev 1.1, ACPI Specifications Rev 2.0, and the PCI Bus Power Management Interface Specifications 1.1. In addition, it can support remote Wake-up capability to power up a remote sleeping station on the network.

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