14 DAY TRIAL // Intel's 2008 roadmap suffered quite a bump with the 45-nanometer quad-core Penryns. Although things seem to run just smoothly for the number one x86 CPU manufacturer, there has been a slight delay in launching the Penryn powerhorses. Initially scheduled for January this year, the official launch date has been discretely pushed back to general "Q1 2008".
It seems that Intel has its own problems, somehow similar to Phenom's shameful performance that has led AMD close to bankruptcy. Anonymous Intel engineers confirmed that there is a hardware problem with the 45-nanometer newcomers. "Intel is very sensitive to mean time to failures. During a simulation, at high clock frequencies, we noticed an increase of potential failures after a designated amount of time," said one of the engineers involved in testing the chips. "This is not acceptable for our customers that require longterm stability. It's a showstopper," he continued.
If the previous errors of errata affecting the chips' L2 and L3 cache performance were simply dismissed as false, the BIOS patches released by Intel did not fix or alleviate the current issue. Therefore, the launch of the quad-core Q9300, Q9450 and Q9550 processors had to be postponed.
Quad-core Xeons are not subject to this kind of degradation, as they are built on a different processor stepping, that has solved the simulated condition issues. Also, the quad-core 45nm Extreme Edition processor that has been unveiled back in November is erratum-free.
We publicly claimed we will launch its 45nm mainstream processors in Q1 2008, and that's exactly what we did," said Intel spokesman Dan Snyder. However, the manufacturer has only unveiled the 16 new 45-nanometer processors, but the quad-cores did not show up.
According to Asus and Gigabyte, the motherboard manufacturers, the 45-nanometer quad-cores will not emerge until February or even March. Hilariously, the delay comes right after the same Dan Snyder told during the Consumer Electronics Show: "The tick-tock model prevents Intel from missing its launch dates. If the "tock" team misses a target date, it doesn't affect the "tick" team."