First post, by Garrett W
- Rank
- Oldbie
I was reminded of a thread on Beyond3D a while back where we were taking a look at the Aladdin 7 chipset. It is unclear to me if any boards sporting this chipset ever reached retail or if it only gained very limited ground in specific OEM solutions. So what's all the fuss about? This wasn't your typical SS7 chipset as it had an iGPU designed by ArtX which would later go on to design the Flipper graphics chip for the Nintendo GameCube and eventually would get acquired by ATi and work primarily on the R300! The chipset apparently offered support for PC-133 SDRAM and dual-channel memory access for increased memory bandwidth that would serve the iGPU.
An archived press release gives us some more info. The press release seems to suggest that the iGPU had dual pipelines(?) and Hardware TnL(!), which is rather insane for a late 99' iGPU. All of these features would make for an undoubtedly interesting chipset both for CPU performance and iGPU that from the suggested specs would blow every other iGPU solution out of the water.
Unfortunately, it appears that only a smattering of boards ever used it and it is unclear if they were ever released on retail, these are:
PCchips M587LMR & M583LMR
Acorp 5ALI61 Plus (the non-plus, vanila 5ALI61 seems to use the Aladdin V, which makes me skeptical of the Plus using Aladdin 7)
PowerColor P561A
A few years ago, I set up a couple of alerts on eBay to notify me if anything resembling those boards ever popped up. Now, I may have goofed something up and put 'em up incorrectly, but nothing has ever come up. My question is, has anyone ever seen a board using this chipset in the wild? Even better, has anyone ever used such a board and if do you still have it perhaps? This is purely academic interest, but obscure hardware is always interesting.