I’ve been thinking of acquiring a board with the Intel 860 (Colusa) chipset. This chipset is historically interesting because it was Intel’s first chipset for NetBurst Xeons, and–at least according to Intel–the only chipset that supports the original Foster Xeon DP processors with the 180nm Willamette core.
The platform is interesting because it was Intel’s first dual-socket Pentium 4 implementation, and the i860 chipset was also the first with support for certain modern amenities like Message Signaled Interrupts (MSIs), enabled by the switch from a dedicated APIC bus to interrupt delivery via FSB messages.
The catch is that the i860 chipset was relatively short-lived, having been cursed with RDRAM. The i860 was introduced in May 2001, and in February 2002 it was already superseded by the DDR SDRAM-based E7500 (Plumas) chipset, which also coincided with the release of 130nm Prestonia Xeons based on the Northwood core.
The i860 was apparently so short-lived that Intel did not manage to release its own board based on the Colusa chipset. There were apparently only four board vendors who did: There was Supermicro P4DCE and P4DC6 (I am guessing that P4DC stands for Pentium 4 Dual Colusa); there was Tyan Thunder i860 (S2603); there was MSI 860D Pro; and there was an obscure Iwill DX400-SN.
The MSI and Iwill boards appear to be very hard to find. The Supermicro and Tyan boards are not, but there’s a catch.
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