Quote Originally Posted by m^2 View Post
They surely are a competition. Istanbul scales to 48 cores. Nehalem to 32 with 64 threads (some say that double as much). Fight!
??

IBM xSeries scale to 16 sockets for Xeon ( older variants could do 32 sockets, not sure if this is still true ) .That is 96 cores.
If Nehalem EX based XSeries sticks to the same line , there would be 128 cores with 256 threads.Unisys offers a similar box with Dunnington, 16 sockets for a total of 96 cores.

From the looks of it , SGI will build a large Altix based Xeon, imagine 512 sockets with 8 cores/16 threads per socket.Problem is if they will be around when Beckton launches.