While not directly linked to the platform, there are questions surrounding HP’s Proliant Gen8 line and whether it may be delayed by Intel’s recent announcement that Ivy Bridge chipset has experienced production delays. The EETimes recently reported the delay of the mobile-focused next generation chipset with an estimated eight to ten week timetable, pushing the release date to sometime in June.

Behind this all is a delay in the production development of the product’s finFET technology.

“‘I think maybe it’s June now,” said Maloney to the Financial Times. It’s unclear whether Maloney was referring to all Ivy Bridge chips or just certain SKUs.

This is the first time, however, that an Intel executive has gone on record to confirm that the successor to Sandy Bridge would be delayed, blaming the push back on the complexity of the new manufacturing process.”

HP’s Gen8 systems are the next generation of HP’s server offerings, moving on from the current Proliant G7 lines introduced in 2010 and based on Intel and Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) x86 processors.  The product is based on an easy-to-manage family of low-power high performance server offerings with many other custom features specifically engineered for the cloud, enterprise, and operations of scale.  Systems that have been seen thus far in HP’s Gen8 line are reported to be based on Intel’s Xeon E5 architecture.  It is notable that reports also allude to development and eventual release of ARM-based systems at some time in the future.

Having personally been on the wrong end of an extended server delays, any sort of impact can be significant to a customer and surely avoided if at all possible. Whether the Ivy Bridge delay affects the Gen8 product remains to be seen. These are two different markets and a hypothetical simultaneous delay of the E5 would have to rank among the most remote of scenarios. The Xeon E5 platform is an evolution of the previous Xeon platform, and the single-socket bearer of performance, integrating LGA 2011 CPU socket format. The Ivy Bridge series is aimed at mobile market and boasts features such as power consumption, increase in GPU, CPU performance, the first 3D transistor technology, USB 3.0 support, and enhanced graphics chip.  It is based on finFET 22nm architecture, and known as TriGate in Intel’s product.

No news is good news as this story has been out for a number of days now. The lack of any statement regarding delays to the Gen8 line seems to confirm that this Ivy Bridge delay is in part strategic, allowing for production yield of a new process to improve and also allowing for notebook vendors to flush existing Sandy Bridge inventory as a reaction to reportedly soft sales. Rumors have recently surfaced that the E5 processor is already in the channel, needing only to be officially announced.  For Intel, the tactical aspects of product release are critical, particularly in mobile competition, where their desktop dominance does not extend. Delays in the mobile market means loss of opportunity to gain market share. All indications seem to point to a timely HP Gen8 release, at least free from any impact from this Intel Ivy Bridge delay.