But the delay could affect HP's ability to win new customers as competitive chips like IBM's Power continue "firing on all cylinders," wrote Gordon Haff, an analyst at Illuminata, in a .

"Delays to Itanium matter less to Intel and the server makers who use it (meaning HP first and foremost) than in the case of x86 Xeon, where a few months' delay can have a major revenue impact," Haff wrote. Customers for servers like HP's Superdome and NonStop value enterprise-class capabilities more than performance, he wrote.

Itanium has been plagued with development problems that have delayed its release multiple times. Intel earlier this year delayed Tukwila's release to the middle of this year to add a faster interconnect and support for new technologies like DDR3 memory. The last Itanium chip, code-named Montecito, was released in 2006.

The delay however hasn't changed manufacturing plans for Tukwila. Tukwila chips will still be manufactured using the old 65-nanometer process, Intel's Ward said. Intel currently manufactures chips using the 45-nm process and will upgrade to the 32-nm process later this year. Intel upgrades its manufacturing process every two years to make chips faster, smaller and more power efficient.

Itanium chips are not volume chips like PC processors, and are mainly customized to meet the needs of server makers, McGregor said. Performance and reliability are a larger measure than size and power, and based on requests from server makers, extra transistors help improve system performance to scale application performance, he said.