The Itanium chip, code-named Tukwila, was originally due for release by the middle of this year. Tukwila is being delayed for certain "application scalability" enhancements that Intel wants to make to the chip architecture, the company said in a statement. The chip maker declined to elaborate on the type of enhancements it plans to make.

During system testing, the company saw an opportunity to enhance the architecture for "highly threaded workloads where contention for system resources plays a dominant role in application scalability," said Patrick Ward, an Intel spokesman.

Itanium chips are 64-bit quad-core processors designed to run fault-tolerant servers that require high uptime. The chips utilize a different instruction set than x86 server chips, and are intended to compete with other server processors based on RISC architecture, like Sun's Sparc and IBM's Power chips. However, the chips have not seen much success, with only a few vendors like Hewlett-Packard selling Itanium-based servers.

The Itanium is mainly designed for mainframe-based applications that require plenty of memory bandwidth, like scientific computing and financial transactions, said Jim McGregor, chief technology strategist at In-Stat. Hewlett-Packard has made huge investments in Itanium and may have asked Intel to make particular design changes to meet the needs of its enterprise customers, he said.

"The Itanium processor is pretty much a custom solution for HP. HP has a huge investment in this, and they buy most of the processors," McGregor said.