Intel's Itanium Plans hit a Speed Breaker

Intel on Monday announced the delay in launch of its newest Itanium processor until the middle of 2006. The processor, code named Montecito was scheduled to be launched in early 2006.

Citing quality reasons, Intel spokesman Scott McLaughlin said, "We're not going into details on the specifics of the processor other than to say we're not satisfied with the quality right now."

The world's largest chipmaker now plans to begin volume production of the next version of the Itanium chip, in mid-2006.

In addition, Montecito won't incorporate the "Foxton" technology that would allowed the chip to run faster when it had cooled. Consequently, its top speed has been reduced from 2GHz to 1.6GHz. Another change will be removal of higher-end Monticito models whose front-side bus--the connection to the rest of the system--runs at 667MHz, leaving only the 400MHz and 533MHz models.

Intel also announced its plans to beef up its Xeon line in 2007 with a new processor code-named "Tigerton." Tigerton will be part of a new Xeon MP platform called "Caneland" that improves on the Reidland platform and Whitefield processor they replace.

One specific advantage that Caneland processors will have is a dedicated high-speed connection between the chipset and memory, improving on earlier and current designs that use a separate front-side bus. AMD regularly mocks Intel for continuing to use the frontside bus, which dates back some twenty years.

"We had an opportunity to be able to deliver even more performance," McLaughlin said.

The Xeon MP chips are used in computer servers that have four microprocessors or more in them. Server computers are the workhorses of computer networks.