José,

I understand that the chipset is now selling in systems, which means I can talk about it more liberally.

First, Unisys does use the E8870 chipset for 16-way processing, and so do others.

Look at the diagram on page 3 of the product brief, and you will see that each SPS component has 4 connections. However, these components can actually connect to up to 6 devices, the other 2 being additional SNC nodes. With 4 total SNC nodes, each carrying 4 Itanium 2 processors, that makes the total number of processors 16.

ftp://download.intel.com/design/chipsets/e8870/E8870SP_PB.pdf

The E8870 is a very large, very sophisticated, very high bandwidth server chipset. I believe people will see that it offers excellent performance in server oriented tasks, and very high availability. I hope it ends up being successful in the market.

(Not speaking for Intel)

José Javier Zarate (jzarate@unav.es) on 2/4/03 wrote:
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>It appears that the E8870 Chipset is being used by some OEMs among others Microway,
>Aspen Systems and founder (and maybe Unisys as it is unknown they have developped
>its own chipset). It also appears to be a high scalability version
>(ntel E8870 Chipset, featuring the E8870SP component) Finalle, the note of future
>availability of the product has disappeared from the webpage as if it were available now.