It looks like we might not see Intel’s quad-core processor for mainframe systems this year after all. According to Brooke Crothers over at Cnet, Tukwila “will come out in early 2009”, which appears to be a bit later than what has been rumored so far. Intel previously said that Tukwila would begin shipping sometime this year, which apparently is still the plan, according to Intel spokesperson Nick Knupffer.

Intel has not confirmed a launch time frame for Tukwila so far, but recently increased its communications efforts for the CPU at its developer conference in Shanghai last March as well as at the IEEE International Solid State Circuits Conference (ISSCC) last February. Tukwila will be Intel’s first 2-billion transistor processor, integrate four cores on a monolithic die that measures 699 mm2.

The 65 nm CPU will run at up to 2 GHz, integrate 30 MB of L2 cache and 96 GB/s processor-to-processor bandwidth through the firm’s new “QuickPath” Interconnect. The peak memory bandwidth of Tukwila is 34 GB/s. Intel says Tukwila has three times the circuitry of the current Itanium 9100 generation with Montvale core. In terms of performance, the manufacturer promises that this new processor will offer about twice the performance of Montvale, while consuming about 25% more power (the CPU is rated at a 130 watt TDP).

Despite the fact that we do not hear much about the Itanium CPU these days, the Itanium Solutions Alliance announced that Itanium-based factory system revenue and system volume continued to grow in 2007, with a year-over-year increase of 30.8 and 36.3%, respectively.