In 2008, Tukwila will be the first shipping Intel microprocessor to make use of the QuickPath low latency interconnect bus and integrated memory controller, à la AMD's Direct Connect Architecture but 5 years later!
The Quad-core Itanium also supports multi-threading making it an 8 core machine, with twice the performance of the current dual core Itanium on most applications. Although Tukwila is planned for this year, it will take several more month for enterprise to "qualify" Tukwila systems before adopting them for their mission critical applications.

"Where are the major OSes for mission critical computing. You go and ask HP... HP-UX and Non-Stop, they are on Itanium. Do they offer these on Xeons? No! ... And Itanium continues to gain share between SPARC and Power, the 2 primary competitors in that space", said Pat Gelsinger, Intel's Sr VP.