Sources close to Intel's plans in Israel told The Register today that the 870 chipset which will support the IA-64 McKinley platform, will have a Rambus interface.

That will come as a boost for the memory IP firm, which last week saw its share price plummet as a result of pre-trial decisions made in a Virginian court.

According to the sources, the Dell Corporation is already committed to producing a McKinley board using the Rambus interface, and, just in case customers have any doubt about the performance of RDRAM, the chipset will also support a Rambus to DDR translator.

Meanwhile, the R-Shasta project, first reported here many months back, which uses a Broadcom Serverworks chipset for the 32-bit Foster Intel processor with four way support, is also close to completion, the same sources add.

The R-Shasta will support four way interleaved DDR memory and include a PCI-X bus. Validation of the chipset is practically complete.

That is good news for Intel. Roadmaps seen by The Register indicated a late Q1/Q2 launch for Foster servers. While Q2 now looks more likely, it shows the project is still on time. ®