Intel is talking about the upcoming launch of the next generation Intel Xeon processor (Nehalem-EX) being bigger than the Xeon 5500 (Nehalem-EP). They are claiming greater than nine times the memory bandwidth compared to the six-core Xeon 7400 Dunnington series, and they are talking about getting three times the number of transactions in database workloads (according to an internal Intel benchmark).  It will be very interesting to see TPC-E benchmarks for these systems. I have seen architecture diagrams for Nehalem-EX showing eight socket systems with 128 memory slots (which would mean up to 1TB of total RAM with 8GB DDR3 DIMMs).

This is a screenshot of a Xeon MP (Beckton) platform with Nehalem-EX processors in a 3U, four socket server. Each physical CPU has eight cores, with hyper-threading, so you have a total of 64 logical cores.

Intel’s Mitch Koyama has a nice demo of the Nehalem-EX at Oracle OpenWorld 2009.