Ok, so linked news goes onto the big thumnail thingie as well? Is there any way to distinguish outside links from TR articles in this case?

Honestly, the biggest reason to get excited about this is: Itanium and Core CPUs on the same system. If they both share the same CSI bus, there's no reason you can't build a system with (at least) one of each CPU type. Then Intel could start migrating more people over to Itanium, by giving the true promise of Core-based x86 performance on their x86 apps while they migrate over to the Itanium arch.

Of course, this is probably a little late, given how much performance ground the x86 arch has made up with the Opteron and Intel's Core response, but still, the Itanium has some serious advantages left to offer, and if Intel is still pushing it, this is probably their last stand.

* CARUSO LOOKS TOWARDS CAMERA BUT OFF TO THE SIDE

CARUSO: It looks like this CSI has been.... interfaced.

* CARUSO DONS GLASSES AND CUE THE WHO THEME SONG

I agree with wingless and wish to add just a bit more. The most straggling part of a PC today is the hard disk, with Data transfer rates of 60-100 MBps [single-RAID], whereas even my old DDR-400 [i use S754 Sempron 2800+ LOL], gives 2900 BMps. The CPU is hardly ever used. Modern PCs make direct performance comparable only when the FSB/HTT are both fast and there is at least 2GB of very fast RAM. Practically the entire instruction/ data lot has to be loaded into memory.
In my opinion, the HDD will always be the bottleneck. We've flogged AMD and Intel so hard that it seemed to hurt the giant and now the underdog is bleeding.
ITS TIME TO FLOG THE REAL SLOWPOKES. Over the last 4 years CPUs have grown about 10 times stronger whereas a standalone HDD speed has increased only by 50-70%. Is there a cartel between the HDD manufacturers? One can only wonder? Slow speeds, failing drives! What would happen to Intel, AMD, NVidia, etc if their chips started failing like HDDs?

AMD Opteron guy here. I just wanted to say a few things to you Intel folks:

I'm actually really excited for all you Intel fans! You'll finally get a system interconnect to go along with those superior processors of yours. 2008 is going to be a great year for Intel and AMD, imo. Intel gets an interconnect that makes use of all the processing power, and AMD gets processors that make use of all this bandwidth our systems have been bleeding for years. My old socket 939 Opty185 pushes Intel DDR2-800 bandwidth at 6300mb/s, with much lower latencies. Its gone unused for the most part. 2008 will finally be a year that we can all compare our systems on more equal terms. I think both our camps will come out winners next year. The race will continue , of course, as both AMD and Intel come out with yet MORE new processor architectures.

I will forever stay a fan of the thinkers and "Innovators".

Yeah, with a few exceptions (integrated graphics, HPC) memory bandwidth is just not a limiting factor in desktop/mobile applications -- latency is. Servers are a different story.

CSI: Intel