Tukwila, the next Itanium chip - which was just delayed this past February until some time around the middle of this year - has been delayed yet again, this time until the first quarter of 2010.

Intel is mumbling something about final system-level testing turning up the chance to further enhance the application scalability needed in high-end systems.

Perhaps, but context is missing. The real reason is supposedly Sun's Sparc chip.

Supposedly the thought of Sparc going to IBM - which would have surely killed the thing in the name of its Sparc-competitive Power chip - put the fear of God into Sparc customers, particularly one very large high-end Sparc server customer that took itself to Intel looking for salvation.

Well, it ran its custom-made, highly threaded software on Itanium and the performance on eight-, 16-, 32-way and higher systems reportedly wasn't exactly what you might call stellar. So, Intel and the Sparc client sat down and figured out a way to ratchet up Itanium's performance, but the solution was going to take a silicon re-spin.

That left Intel with a decision. Launch Tukwila for two- and four-ways now, and do a second launch for the high end in Q1-ish, or just push out the launch.

Enter Beckton, the eight-core Nehalem-EX Xeon chip whose arrival Intel is supposed to trumpet in a few day. It's supposedly pretty darn good in the low-end space, and will add some of Itanium's reliability features. And while some silicon re-spins only take three months or so, Itanium isn't exactly at the top of Intel's priority list compared to the Core, Xeon and Atom.

So nothing's as simple as it looks. The cost of splitting the launches; the priorities in Intel's factories, and a big-time customer design-win all came into play.

Now Sun is actually going to Oracle, not IBM, and Oracle CEO Larry Ellison is telling people he's going to keep Sparc and Sun's hardware going but it costs a way lot of money to keep designing and making sexy microprocessors, so in the end Sun could be a tugboat for the chip it used to compare to the Titanic and HP benefits.