Intel's Itanic Tyger, Tyger not burning bright

BACK AT IDF last week we had occasion to bump into the spinmeistress in charge of Intel's Itanium system, and we had a few questions we thought we'd ask before we were subjected to the Neal Diamante tribute band.

One question related to the introduction of Intel's own McMonster, the so-called "tiger" box which we saw at Computex earlier this year.

All very interesting. The folk on the Intel stand at Computex told us that the Tiger McKinley was due to launch in July. But, last week, when we asked whether Tiger was shipping, we were definitely told that it was due for launch in Q4.

Let's try and see if we can join up the dots in this interesting little story.

Sources totally unrelated to Intel apart from the fact they were in San Jose told us that it was HP that had pushed the Mighty Chipzilla to make its McKinley introduction in July. While Intel was reluctant to commit to that date, the quid pro quo that exists between Princess Carly and Craig Barrett because of the Alpha deal last year, persuaded a reluctant Chipzilla to go to the altar with Mr Tiger.

Unfortunately, Mr Tiger's own chipset was not in as good shape as it ought to have been, our sources tell us, and that made for a big McKinley rejig.

For this reason, the Tiger's not shipping yet, although other systems which use different (their own) chipsets, are happily whirring away using McKinley.

The important thing here is deniability. Some innocent Intel soul told us that Tiger would ship in July, while another maybe not-so-innocent Intel soul told us last week it was now Q4. The gap is explained by the source in the middle who gave chapter+verse for the missing Itanic months. That all seems to add up, to us. µ

See Also
Sneak Preview: Intel "Tiger 4" Quad-CPU Itanium 2