Intel's new Tukwila server chip (latest member of the Itanium architecture family) is apparently about to see light of day - and it is a doozy in a number of ways:

• 65nm process
• 21.5x32.5 square mm die
• four dual threaded cores
• 30MB of cache
• QuickPath links (NO FSB! - four links for linking to other processors, two half links for I/O)
• up to 96GB/sec peak processor to processor data transfer (over the QuickPath links)
• memory bandwidth up to 34GB/sec

The question is - will it actually perform like that?

Currently, AMD has quite a lead in total I/O throughput thanks to its Opterons having three HyperTransport channels in addition to dual memory channels; QuickPath (formerly known as CSI) is trying to change that, promising higher bandwidth.