Without competition from AMD, Intel starts to put the brakes on releases

I'd been worried that this would happen ... without realistic competition from AMD, Intel delays the launch of three quad-core 45nm processors.

DigiTimes has the scoop:

Intel has already notified its partners that it will push back the launch of the three CPUs to February or March next year, depending on AMD's schedule for triple-core and the upcoming Phenom CPUs.

The three delayed processors are the Core 2 Quad Q9300, Q9450 and Q9550 units.  Without competition from AMD, Intel have decided to hold back these processors for the time being so that their releases won't damage 65nm quad-core sales.

This is a problem.  Without realistic competition from AMD, Intel is likely to go back to a much slower development cycle.  While it's unlikely that things will get as bad as they did during the stagnant days of the 486, it's still going to mean that we see less in the way of CPU performance increases in 2008 than we did during 2007.

Ultimately, this means is that there will be fewer cool bits of silicon being released next year.

Thoughts?