QP assist

Power and SPARC both have the ability to snoop into other CPU's cache. I wouldn't doubt if Itanium already had this capability as well. No, I think the delay is that Tukwila is embarrassingly slow and Intel is tweaking the compilers.

Usually the vendors release a chip that gives them good performance and then they release a later version of the chip that has some simple fixes and tweaks, but not much performance improvement; they then tweak the compilers to give a performance increase. With Intel tweaking the compilers up front, there will be no mid-life performance boost from compiler tweaking. Tukwila is dead from the git-go.