NEC and Unisys have produced their first common platform three years after they bound themselves to do it, using as its base Intel’s new four- and six-core Dunnington chip.

The pair is pressing the chip to its outer limits in a mainframe-y configuration of 16 processors, or 96 cores, laid out in 4U increments, each holding four multi-core chips and capable of supporting, all told, 1TB of memory.

The systems, which run Windows Server 2008, are targeted at high-end enterprise use such as database-intensive tasks, ERP and server consolidation using virtualization.

NEC, which ran up the common chipset and is making the boxes in Japan for both companies, calls its machine the Express5800/A1160; Unisys calls its the ES7000 Model 7600R.

It marks NEC’s entry into the large-scale mid-range server market.

Unisys is stressing the real-time characteristics its software and service lend the hardware

The chipset NEC designed features an enhanced memory bus speed of 677MHz, a 2GB-a-second hot-replaceable PCI subsystem for improved I/O and a dedicated snoop cache memory and snoop filter for optimal NUMA scalability.

The system can support a maximum 24 hot-swap PCI slots and provides advanced partitioning capabilities that can combine partitions into an SMP system.

NEC’s pricing begins at $29,849 for a four-socket quad-core rig with 8GB of memory. Available starts in Q4. Unisys pricing ranges from $26,430 to $135,000.