Sun Microsystems announced last week that it will launch a 900MHz version of its 64bit UltraSparc III processor by the end of October.

Although this is good news for enterprises, many of Sun's customers will be frustrated by the fact that the new chip will initially be used only in the vendor's Sun Blade 1000 workstations.

The fastest chip currently supported in Sun's high-end E10000 64-way server is a 466MHz UltraSparc II. The firm could not give a date for when the UltraSparc III chip will be made available for use in its high-end servers.

However, if recent history is any indicator, the new processor will not be offered in high-end systems for at least a year.

Sun has consistently failed to meet promised delivery dates; the 900MHz chip was originally scheduled to launch last September.

Recently the company suffered a setback when it discovered a design fault in the current UltraSparc III chip that meant a pre-fetch pipeline must be disabled for the chip to correctly handle floating point calculations.

Disabling the pre-fetch pipeline causes software to operate up to 10 per cent slower than originally claimed.

The new chip should not suffer from this particular problem, but Sun faces fresh challenges in the manufacturing process. This is the first commercial chip using copper interconnects to be produced by Sun's manufacturing partner, Texas Instruments. Experts said the move to copper interconnects is not a trivial task.

Likewise, the jump from the previous maximum speed of 650MHz to 900MHz has been achieved by reducing the size of the components on the chip.

While this is somewhat simpler than the introduction of copper interconnects, shrinking components has occasionally caused problems with other chip designs.

However, any such delays or problems suffered by Sun are unlikely to give Intel's 64bit Itanium any advantage, as this architecture is currently hampered by a lack of support for hardware partitioning.

Partitioning is a technique that enables one server to run several operating systems simultaneously. It is seen as a key selling point as the ability to consolidate several small server systems into a single, larger server platform enables organisations to reduce IT operating costs.