Intel  announced several changes Monday to its road map for server processors, delaying its first dual-core Itanium 2 processor and replacing a future multicore Xeon processor with a new design that eliminates the performance penalty of shared connections to a chipset.

Montecito, the dual-core version of the Itanium 2 processor, will not be available in large volumes until the middle of next year, instead of the early part of next year as originally planned, said Scott McLaughlin, an Intel spokesman. While preliminary shipments of the processor are already under way, Intel decided to make a few changes to the chip in order to reach the company's standard for "production level quality," McLaughlin said, declining to specify the nature of the changes.

But Montecito will no longer ship with Foxton, a sophisticated power-management technology, and the speed of its front-side bus connection to memory will run at 533 MHz instead of the 667 MHz speed originally scheduled for the design, he said.

Intel also has killed Whitefield, a multicore Xeon processor for servers with four or more processors, McLaughlin said. It is being replaced by a new processor called Tigerton that will appear in 2007, the same time-frame in which Whitefield was expected to arrive.

Tigerton processors will use a high-speed interconnect technology that will allow each processor to connect directly to the server's chipset, McLaughlin said. Current Xeon processors in multiprocessor servers must share a front-side bus connection to the chipset in order to access data from system memory or I/O, a bottleneck that industry analysts have blamed for the current performance gap between Intel's server chips and Advanced Micro Devices' Opteron processors.

Intel's next-generation architecture , announced by President and CEO Paul Otellini in August, will be used as the blueprint for Tigerton. This architecture is based on low-power design principles used to build Intel's Pentium M processor for notebooks.

Whitefield had been expected to help tip the performance battle back toward Intel in 2007, but Tigerton should be even more powerful, McLaughlin said. AMD has enjoyed favorable reviews from industry analysts, and even companies such as HP, for the performance of its Opteron server processors as compared to Intel's Xeon chips.

The IDG News Service is a Network World affiliate.