Originally published November 27 2005
Intel delays Itanium processor release
by Mike Adams, the Health Ranger, NaturalNews Editor
A spokesman for Intel has said they need time to do more testing, but analysts think the delay may give competitors time to advance their own products. The processors are due to ship by mid-2006.
In a major embarrassment to the world's biggest chipmaker, Intel plans to delay the release of new versions of its ballyhooed Itanium processor until next year.
An Intel spokesman said Montecito, its first dual-core Itanium will ship in volume by the middle of 2006, instead of in the first quarter, as earlier announcements indicated.
Tigerton will be part of a new Xeon MP platform called "Caneland" that Giles said 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 (Quote, Chart) regularly mocks Intel for continuing to use the frontside bus (define), which dates back some twenty years.
"We're still comfortable with the performance and expect Montecito to offer a 2X performance improvement over earlier versions of Itanium," said Giles.
However, some analysts are concerned the delay gives competitors that much more time to advance their own performance.
"Unless they can improve the performance of those chips, then they [Intel] suffer a double whammy -- they're late and the competition has moved on to higher performance," Nathan Brookwood, an analyst with Insight64, told internetnews.com.
Competitors such as Sun Microsystems (Quote, Chart) have specific campaigns targeting Itanium customers, included a Web site headlined "Get off the Itanic" that compares the Itanium to the doomed Titanic ocean liner.
Speculating on reasons for the delay, Brookwood said even a company the size of Intel can have problems dealing with a processor as complicated as Itanium.
Intel plans to beef up its Xeon line to better compete with AMD's hot-selling dual-core Opteron.
Brookwood believes resources for Xeon are being made a higher priority because that's Intel's best response to AMD.
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