The next Itanium, a major revision code-named Montecito, had been scheduled for debut this year and volume production in the first quarter of 2006 so the chipmaker can address quality problems. Instead, it will arrive in mid-2006, spokeswoman Erica Fields said on Monday. Its successor, "Montvale," was pushed from late 2006 into 2007, while the next major redesign, "Tukwila," was pushed from 2007 into 2008.
In addition, Montecito won't incorporate the "Foxton" technology that allowed the chip to run faster when it was cool enough. Consequently, its top speed has been reduced from 2GHz to 1.6GHz, Fields said.
"It was required for us to do additional work to meet the production-level quality Intel is known for," Fields said of the delay, though she wouldn't detail what quality issues had emerged.
Faced with initial delays, poor performance and software incompatibility with Xeon, Intel in recent years backed off its ambition to make Itanium the processor of choice for all servers. Instead, the company tailored it just for higher-end machines that compete with those using IBM's Power and mainframe chips and Sun Microsystems' Sparc line.
Hewlett-Packard, which initiated the chip project, remains a major backer, but Dell and IBM have dropped Itanium support, and Microsoft's future version of Windows for Itanium will be suited only for high-end jobs.
Things look rosier for Xeon, which enjoys widespread market popularity. However, rival Advanced Micro Devices has been gaining share with its Opteron chip.
"Intel has some breathing room, but they need to get moving," said Gartner analyst Martin Reynolds.
Intel scrapped one Xeon design, "Whitefield," and replaced it with another, "Tigerton." The major difference is that Tigerton chips are joined to the rest of the system with a technology Intel is calling the "dedicated high-speed interconnect." With it, each processor will have its own connection to a computer's chipset rather than today's design, in which the chips share a data pathway called a front-side bus.
"Each processor has its own connection to the chipset," Field said, providing "significantly better system performance."
That change has another consequence: The delay of an Intel plan called the Common Platform Architecture that would mean Itanium and Xeon processors would share the same interconnect and chipsets. That plan would have simplified system design and been instrumental in eliminating cost differences.
