Yesterday, Intel announced that it will delay the launch of its first dual-core Itanium 2 processor and that it will also be replacing one future multi-core Xeon, which was supposed to be launched in the near future.
Although Intel wasn't very clear about the reasons behind these changes, it is thought that the processors needed further testing.

Montecino, the dual core version of Itanium 2 will be mass-produced only as of the middle of next year, in spite of original plans indicating an early 2006 launch. In spite of these delays, Intel shouldn't be too worried about losing ground to competition, considering on the high-end server market its direct competitors are IBM and Sun Microsystems.

The Montecino will come without the Foxton technology, which is a sophisticated power-management technology, and the speed of its FSB connection to memory will run at 533MHz instead of the 667MHz speed originally scheduled for the design.

The company is also about to let go of the Whitefield project, a multi-core Xeon processor for servers with four or more processors. This processor is being replaced by a new one, called Tigerton, that will appear in 2007, in the same period of time Whitefield was expected to arrive.